


The Lucky Ones

by daniomalley



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, Body Horror, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-11 00:48:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 51,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13513254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daniomalley/pseuds/daniomalley
Summary: Lost and stranded on a ship millions of miles from Earth, Dave wants nothing more than to stay hidden from the crew until he can get somewhere safe. But then he runs into another fugitive and suddenly things become a lot more complicated.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the friends who encouraged and helped with this fic. A massive thanks in particular to my beta [Song_of_Staying](http://archiveofourown.org/users/song_of_staying/pseuds/song_of_staying), who put an enormous amount of work into this and is basically a rockstar <3

Stowing away on a cargo ship had seemed like a great idea at the time. Big, lots of places to hide, no military presence to speak of. But the drawbacks were plentiful.

Dave had made a little nest in one of the cargo bays. He wasn't sure what the ship was transporting, but it was stored in containers twenty feet square, stacked to the ceiling in rows with narrow walkways between. He spent his time in a small alcove where the containers met the walls of the ship. The walls weren't completely straight, and there was a little extra space where the walkway met an indentation at the side of the ship. There was enough space to lie down, and if he needed to Dave could hide in the gap and be almost completely hidden from view.

The trouble was, it was cold. And dark. He'd stolen blankets, but they only did so much. Getting food was risky, and the only activity available to pass the time if he didn't want to risk being caught was lying in the dark reflecting on all the ways his life had spectacularly gone off the rails. And another, hitherto unconsidered problem, was that Dave might not be the only person to think this ship a great place to hide.

He was looking at a scratch on the side of the container at the end of the walkway leading to his nest. He hadn't put it there, and it hadn't been there that morning. He was sure of that, because all these containers looked the fucking same and to figure out where he was, he had to memorise the various tiny marks which littered each one. This scratch was new.

He retreated to his nest and pulled his meagre possessions into the inadequate space between container and wall. He didn't want to have to move. He wasn't even sure where else he could go, if the cargo hold wasn't safe anymore.

He passed the time by remembering the last time he'd seen his bro. He'd been angry with him, because Bro was leaving, and he'd been scared, because Bro was going into danger. He'd tried to be cool, but at the last minute he'd cracked, clung to Bro and begged him to stay. Bro had pushed him off and told him not to be such a pussy. At the time, Dave had taken it as some twisted form of Striderly affection. Now, he wondered if Bro had maybe been a bit relieved to leave him behind, and even more relieved to come back and find Dave gone. He knew Bro had never really wanted to be responsible for a kid.

Well, that was six years ago and he wasn't a kid anymore. Hadn't been, really, ever since the Alternian fleet found their hiding place and took him, Rose, and John away. Thinking of that summoned a memory of the last time he'd seen John, but he forcefully smothered it. It wasn't a pleasant memory.

For a second Dave was relieved when the sound of footsteps distracted him from dwelling on the past, but then he remembered that hearing someone else moving around down here was a bad thing. No one was supposed to be down here. No one except him.

Dave crouched in the shadows, not daring to move or even breathe, but the footsteps came closer and closer. This was no good, he couldn't lie here like a sitting duck. He needed a weapon.

The only thing which might suffice was a heavy length of pipe he'd retrieved from a pile of scraps not long after he'd come aboard. He reached for it now, the fingers of his right hand finding it easily under the blankets, but it was too heavy for him to lift one-handed.

He shifted to his knees, trying to do so without making noise, but he heard the footsteps stop, then resume slower, and quieter. They'd heard him. 

Grimacing, Dave stood, lifting the pipe in front of himself. The footsteps went quiet.

Should he step out of his hiding place, or wait? What would give him the most advantage? 

It probably wouldn't make much difference, but Dave didn't want to wait passively until he was found, so he stepped out, holding his pipe in a way he hoped was casual enough to be intimidating without coming across like a challenge.

There was a troll in the walkway. Of course it was a troll, who else would be brain dead enough to board this heap of junk ship? Apart from him, of course.

The troll was holding a sickle down at his side, and Dave had to fight not to panic when he saw it. Sickles were the weapons favoured by the threshecutioners. If a threshecutioner had found him, he might as well kill himself now and save him the trouble. It would be less painful.

But as the seconds passed and the troll didn't move, Dave realised he wasn't wearing the threshecutioner uniform. And then he started to take in other details, like the scared expression on his face, and the pack slung over his back...

"Sorry, bud, there's only space for one stowaway in here. Go find your own."

He spoke with all the bravado he could muster, but behind his stoic expression Dave was frightened. The troll was bigger and no doubt stronger than him, and carrying a more dangerous weapon. Still, Bro had trained him. Dave was sure he could take this guy. Probably. 

"What the bulgechafing fuck did you call me, human?" the troll asked with a sneer which had become all too familiar to Dave over the years . Even the trolls who’d been enslaved right alongside him had thought they were better than the humans around them, and as for the trolls who’d ostensibly been in charge, well... the less said the better . 

Dave shifted the pipe in his grip, hoping to draw the troll's attention to it. "I said move along, or be moved," he said. "This is my spot, and I'm not sharing."

The troll rolled his eyes. "Oh, no!" he said. "The other wigglers on the recreation field won't let me play! Whatever will I do? I guess I'll just go and cry bitter tears of rejection while eating slime bugs and thinking about how much happier I'd be if I were a less terrible person, all because I so desperately wanted a patch of your tiny hiding-shithole and you wouldn't share !"

The troll turned and began to walk away, although he didn't turn his back completely, so he obviously wasn't a complete idiot.

Dave watched him leave, knowing that his expression betrayed nothing and feeling no small amount of pride that he'd convinced the troll to back down. He might be playing it off like he just couldn't be bothered, but he couldn't fool Dave. He was backing off, and keeping an eye on Dave over his shoulder as he left.

Dave waited until the troll was out of sight, until he could no longer hear the faint tapping of his footsteps echoing off the metal containers, and then made himself count slowly to a thousand just to make sure before he let himself move. It was a calculated risk. He didn’t want to still be here if the troll came back with some friends, or a better weapon, but nor could he afford to make a move before the troll was well and truly gone. Dave needed to make sure he wouldn’t be followed.

He packed up his stuff, cursing under his breath. Looked like he'd lost his hideout after all.

***

Dave saw the troll a few more times after that, but always from a distance, and never anywhere near the much less comfortable but far better concealed corner where he’d taken up residence. A couple of times, he spotted the troll near the trash receptacles where he scavenged for food scraps. They saw each other at almost the same instant, froze, then went about their business, trying to ignore each other without losing track of each other's movements.

Once, he was wandering around the storage containers, bored out of his mind, and heard a noise somewhere between a hiss and a growl. The troll appeared from between two containers thirty yards away, sickle held high, and Dave changed direction and briskly walked away. He must have been close to the troll's hiding place for him to react so aggressively, and Dave didn't actually want to cause problems for the guy. He just wanted to be left alone.

The next time he saw the troll, Dave was snooping around the sleeping quarters, looking for clues about where the ship was now and where it was headed. He couldn't hide on board forever. It had been nearly two months and he'd already had enough, but he needed to be careful about where he ended up.

Last time the ship had made a stop he’d been on the verge of sneaking onto a shuttle down to the planet’s surface, but at the last moment he'd realised that the planet it had reached was Alternia itself. That would not have ended well.

No, what he needed was to get back to Earth, or, failing that, some other planet with a strong rebel presence. He was on a military supply ship (as far as he could tell, the trolls had no other kind), so surely it would eventually go somewhere there was fighting. He just had to find out.

The problem was, as a human on a ship full of trolls he stuck out like a sore thumb glued to a fish. And the fish was out of water . He had to wait until the middle of the day, when most of the trolls were asleep, before he ventured out, using every trick he knew to pass unnoticed.

The trolls didn't seem to have much use for common areas, which Dave could understand. Who'd hang out with a troll if they had any alternative? Still, he knew there was a spot on Brown Deck where a communal computer could be found.

Pulling his hood up to hide his blond hair and lack of horns, Dave crept up to the computer. It was one of those weird Alternian biological hybrid ones, where half the operating system was comprised of something living. It gave Dave the willies, but he put that aside and focused on operating the unfamiliar controls. He'd learned to read Alternian characters, but he was slow at it. He felt horribly exposed, standing there leaning in towards the monitor with his back to the room, but he had to risk it. He needed to figure out how and when he was getting off this ship.

The good news was that they were bound for a suitable planet, one way out on the borders of the Alternian empire, where he should be safe, or if not safe, at least be able to join the rebel forces there and do some damage to the Alternian army. The downside was that it would take at least three more weeks to get there.

Another three weeks of isolation and darkness. Sure, Dave had survived the past two months, but it was getting more and more unbearable every day. He might go crazy in that time. 

He was looking for news about Earth when he heard the sound of several sets of heavy footsteps approaching from behind. It made Dave’s breath freeze in his chest. Fuck, fuck, why had he hung around here so long? He’d been so intent on satisfying his nostalgia and homesickness he’d stopped being careful. He cast a desperate glance to the right from the corner of his eyes and saw two uniformed trolls coming his way. He shuffled to the left, but someone was approaching from that direction too, and before Dave could abscond, that troll reached out and wrapped an arm around his neck, bellowing, "There you are, you work dodging piece of shit!"

Dave was so tense that upon being grabbed by the troll he jumped hard enough that, if the troll not had such a good hold on him, he might have propelled himself through the side of the ship and into the vacuum of space. At least the mysterious troll's grip kept his head down and hid his decidedly un-trollish features.

The troll spun him around, and he saw the legs belonging to the other trolls. He decided not to put up a fight until they were well out of the way and he wasn't outnumbered.

"Come with me," the troll said. "I've got a _special_ job I like to give to trolls who think they can get away with shirking."

One of the trolls walking past snickered, and the one holding Dave immediately snapped, "You want to volunteer too, bulgewipe? There's plenty to go around!"

"No, sir," the other troll said, and within moments he and his friend had both scurried away. 

Dave was dragged away by the scruff of his neck. This troll still hadn't realised he was human. How was that possible? He supposed his hood and cap kept his face covered, and his hands were pinned against the troll's side, but still. He wasn’t built like a troll.

The troll marched him away from the sleeping quarters - good - and towards the cargo hold - even better. Dave waited until they were in a good spot, far from where any other trolls would be and with plenty of escape routes, and then dug his heels in, throwing his weight to one side to try to get the troll off balance.

Unfortunately, the troll picked that exact moment to release his grip on Dave and step away, and Dave stumbled, catching himself against the side of a container. He looked around, starting to panic. The troll had surely seen him now, and unless he could manage to kill him he'd spend the rest of his time on this ship being hunted, but...

It wasn't a member of the crew who had found him. It was the other stowaway, the troll he'd spent his time avoiding, and who'd been avoiding him . He’d picked up a jacket somewhere, the uniform most of the crew wore, with an insignia on the sleeve which Dave knew represented a middling rank. 

They stared at each other for a minute or two. Dave felt like he should say something - thanks, maybe - but before he could find the words to convey the right impression (that he hadn't needed any help and had definitely had the whole situation under control, but still it had been somewhat cool of the guy to intervene), the troll opened his mouth and Dave turned on his heel and darted away. 

Uncool, Strider, he told himself as he ran. So incredibly uncool. No one could ever know.

***

Dave was more cautious after that, not letting himself succumb to the temptation to sneak out and use one of the public computers. It was a necessary precaution, but it left him feeling more isolated than ever. Maybe that was why he started saving some of the food he scavenged, the things which trolls liked but which were inedible to humans, the things he'd normally toss aside without a second thought. Trolls ate strange things; creatures with tough, indigestible flesh and scales shaped like thorns, meat which tasted like cough medicine mixed with gasoline . Some of the things trolls considered delicacies made his stomach turn. But whatever, no one was asking him to eat it . 

He left the food in one of the main passages down in the cargo bay, somewhere the troll was sure to come across it before anyone else bothered to come down here. He left it well away from anywhere that the troll might have made into his den; leaving food so close to his hiding place would only be interpreted as a threat . 

The first few times, the food was left untouched. Once, it was actually scattered across the floor like someone had kicked it. But after a few days, Dave started to notice that the choicest morsels had been taken, and then the whole lot.

Sometimes, when Dave went to leave his offering of food, there was something already there. A few pieces of fruit, or a few bites of fish. It didn't happen often. Dave supposed that made sense; there was plenty of food to be found on the ship which trolls could digest but not humans, and none of the reverse. The troll would want to save most of what he scavenged for himself.

Now, when he encountered the troll while he was going about his business, rather than warily backing away Dave made a point of giving the guy a solemn nod. The troll tended to respond by flipping him off, which only encouraged Dave to acknowledge him with even more gravity. Had anyone asked, Dave would have insisted it was all in the name of irony. Then again, if anyone had been around to ask, it would have meant that Dave wasn't so starved for company that he was trying to socialise with a member of the same species which had enslaved him and all his friends . 

One morning, Dave noticed the troll heading in the direction of the upper decks, and called out to him.

"Hey," he said. "Watch your step up there. There's trolls all over the fucking place, having some kind of party. Except, instead of getting drunk and dancing, they're fighting each other."

"Fuck off," the troll said, and then, a second later, "What?"

"Something's going on up there," said Dave. "Fuck if I know what, but you wouldn't get me up there, even for the most ironically shitty clip art known to man. It's like Twelfth Perigee's Eve up in there."

The troll frowned at him. "Nothing you say makes any fucking sense. Do you do that on purpose?" He pulled out some kind of handheld device like a cell phone, and prodded at it.

"Fuck me," he said. "It _is_ Twelfth Perigee's Eve."

"I told you," said Dave, and then added an obligatory, "dog ." 

The troll gave him a withering glare and slumped against the wall. "Well, there go my plans for the day," he muttered.

"Oh yeah?" Dave asked. "Were you going to squeeze in a bit of sneaking around, maybe some dumpster diving? Finish it off with stealing some more batteries for your flashlight? I can see why you're pissed."

"It would have been better than being stuck down here with you, feeling myself get progressively dumber every time you open your ignorance trap," said the troll. Dave responded by holding his hands up to either side.

"Hey, I'm not keeping you here," he said, just to show how little he cared, how unaffected he would be if the troll chose that moment to walk away. How relieved he wouldn't be if he decided to stick around.

"Sure," the troll said. "I could just go off by myself and enjoy my own sorry company, that would be so fucking much better." The troll stayed in the same position and showed no sign of leaving. Dave quietly exhaled.

Maybe they were both desperate for a little company, because neither of them moved until they were too tired and hungry to keep irritating each other. After that, they would exchange words when they encountered one another. Sometimes they hung out for a while - although never as long as they had on Twelfth Perigee's Eve - and it could almost have been like Dave was hanging out with a friend back home, playing on his brother's Xbox, except for the cold metallic surroundings and the vastly inferior food and the fact that the troll was, well, a troll.

"My name's Karkat," he said one day.

"Huh?" Dave said intelligently, and then, once he'd caught up, "Oh."

They really hadn't shared anything about themselves at all. Dave wasn't sure what the troll's - Karkat's - reason was for that, but he didn't want to reveal anything about himself that might be used to figure out where he'd come from, or that might connect him to his friends. 

But really, if the - Karkat - wanted to make trouble for him, he'd had endless opportunities since the first time they'd seen one another. And what could the guy do with his first name, anyway? How many humans out there were named Dave?

"Dave," he said. "That's my name," he added, probably unnecessarily, if Karkat's eyeroll was anything to go by.

Then, perhaps because sharing information which he'd guarded so carefully for so long had made Dave feel vulnerable, he blurted out, "What are you doing on this ship?"

Karkat glared at him, but Dave wasn't easy to intimidate. "I'm taking a fucking vacation, nookstain, what about you?"

"Same," Dave said, allowing his mouth to curve up at one corner. "But I've got to say, the catering on this cruise leaves a lot to be desired. I'm going to leave a pretty scathing Yelp review once I get home."

"Everything you say is nonsense," Karkat grumbled. "There are rodents on this ship that would make better conversational partners."

Whether he meant that or not, Karkat continued to stop and talk with Dave whenever they encountered one another. They didn’t bring up the topic of why they were on the ship again, Dave because Karkat obviously didn’t want to talk about it and there were much more entertaining ways to piss him off, and Karkat because… well, Dave assumed because it didn’t take much imagination to guess why a human might be in hiding on a troll cargo ship.

Lighting in the cargo hold was dim and always tinted faintly blue or yellow, but one day Dave met Karkat in one of the better lit passages near the sleeping quarters. In the better light, he realised a couple of things. Karkat was younger than he’d thought, not even fully grown yet by troll standards, probably close to Dave’s age. His eyes were still mostly yellow like Dave had heard juvenile trolls were, although he’d never actually seen it before. 

More importantly, though, the colour that was just starting to fill in Karkat’s eyes was a bright red, and that wasn’t normal. Dave wasn't sure what happened to trolls whose blood was an abnormal colour according to their shitty fucked up hemospectrum, but he knew what they did to humans they didn't approve of, and here was this troll in the bowels of a cargo ship, living on scraps and avoiding contact with any members of his own species. Dave could guess .

***

Dave didn't dare venture back to the more populated areas of the ship after the last near miss, which made it rather challenging to acquire news about the ship's progress. But on the other hand, he and Karkat were on speaking terms now.

"Do you know how far the ship is from its next stop?" Dave asked one day.

"It's headed for some system called Galaria," Karkat replied.

"What?" Dave snapped. "That can't be right - last time I checked we were heading for a planet called Morboth."

"We arrived," said Karkat. "The ship departed yesterday."

As big as the ship was, it didn't actually land on the planets it delivered supplies to. It sat in orbit and sent shuttles down to the planet's surface, and there was never an indication that it had changed direction or speed. So, although Dave didn't want to believe it, it was entirely too plausible that he had missed his opportunity to get off the ship. 

"Fuck," he said, and then, more loudly, "Fuck!"

"Quiet! You want them to hear us?"

"I was planning to get off the ship on that planet," he groaned. "Now I'm gonna be stuck on this tin can for god knows how much longer."

A series of expressions crossed Karkat's face, but Dave was too worked up to try to decipher them. "How awful for you," he said sarcastically. "Stuck on a massive spaceship with only me for company ." 

"I was hoping that off the ship I might be able to get my hands on some real food," said Dave. "Steak. Potato chips. Rice. Do you know what I'd give right now for a bowl of unflavoured white rice?"

"I don't know what that is, but it sounds appalling."

"If my diet was mostly comprised of bugs, I wouldn't talk shit about what other people choose to eat," said Dave. He sighed. Well, this sucked, but at least he wasn't completely alone anymore. "How long until we get to this Gala-whatever system?"

"A bit less than a Perigee," Karkat said, and Dave nodded. That was about three weeks, then. Not too long. He could do this.

"What do you know about it?" Dave asked. "Are there rebels there? Is it a big place? What are the planets like?"

"I don't know, Dave, do I look like your personal fucking data repository?" Karkat barked, but Dave was used to his outbursts by now. He stared at Karkat until the troll shrugged and said, "I'll find out what I can for you, fuck. Just stop looking at me like that."

It turned out that Galaria was a small system of six planets. Four of them were inhabited, but Dave dismissed two as options, one because it was too far from the sun to be habitable for humans, and the second because the Empire was entirely too close to crushing the resistance movement there. That left two planets, one with a temperate climate and a large, well organised resistance, and one which had a peculiar orbit which rendered most of its surface uninhabitable and therefore of limited interest to Alternia.

"Which one do you think would be better?" Dave asked. "I'm leaning towards Cathla. I know it's got really bizarre weather, but that might be kind of cool, don't you think? And besides, it would be easier to fly under the radar there, since there's nothing there the Alternian army would be interested in."

"Except for rebels and fugitives," Karkat said. "Trust me, Alternia won't be content to just leave them in peace. They'll come to wipe out the resistance there sooner or later."

Well, that was less than encouraging. Still, Dave refused to be disheartened. He continued to learn as much about the system as he could, weighing the pros and cons of both planets and knowing that, in the end, the decision would probably come down to when he had the best chance of boarding a shuttle undetected.

So, when the ship came to rest in orbit around temperate Palla, Dave sought Karkat out.

"This is our chance!" he said. "They're using the big shuttle to take a shipment of supplies down. We can just hide in one of these containers and wait until dark to sneak out."

"Sounds like a great plan," Karkat said stiffly. "Good luck."

Dave was floored. "What do you mean?" he asked. "You're not coming? Where are you going to go? You can't be planning to just stay on this ship forever."

"It really doesn't concern you, does it? Go on, Dave. It's been slightly not-awful knowing you."

Dave didn't move, and after a moment Karkat snapped at him. "What are you waiting for? Hurry up and get into a container before it's too late."

"Why won't you come with me?"

"You pan-rotted bulgelicker, you can't possibly enjoy my company that much."

Dave recognised the deflection for what it was, and refused to be distracted, keeping his eyes locked firmly on Karkat's face. They could hear footsteps now, the trolls coming to collect the containers which were going to be taken to the shuttle. It was too late.

Karkat was obviously pissed, but with trolls nearby they needed to move. Karkat made his way deeper into the cargo hold, and Dave followed him.

"What's keeping you here?" he asked when the sounds of the other trolls were far behind them.

"Idiot," Karkat grumbled, but there was no real venom in it. Dave waited patiently, until at last Karkat said, "I've got a friend on this ship."

"Really?" Dave said, glad for once that his shades helped hide his expression on those occasions when he couldn't manage it by himself. "Can they get us a better room?"

"No," Karkat snapped, and Dave could tell from his tone that any further jokes would not be received well. He shut his mouth. "He can't leave the ship, and I won't leave without him," Karkat said. "You should have gone when you had the chance, Dave. I know you want out of here, but I can't come with you."

Dave's mind was racing. "So your friend, is he a prisoner or something?" he asked.

"I... basically, yes."

"Is that why you're on this ship, to rescue him?" Karkat just shrugged without answering. "Okay," Dave said. "So where is he? What's your plan, to get him out?"

"There _is_ no plan, you empty-panned sad imitation of intelligent life! I'm not going to rescue him! It can't be done!"

Dave took a step back, unnerved by the ferocity of Karkat's reply.

"Then what the fuck are you doing?" he demanded. "If you got on this ship, you must have been planning to do something. If there's really no hope, then... it's awful, but what's the point of you staying here?"

He made himself stand firm, even though he wasn't entirely sure that Karkat wouldn't take a swing at him. He looked as angry as Dave had ever seen him, and he wanted to back down, but he'd given up his shot at getting off the ship for the guy and he wanted to know why.

Karkat shrugged , the anger seeming to drain out of him like air from a punctured tyre as he sagged. "I didn't really think it through, I guess," he said. "Past Karkat makes a stupid fucking decision, what a complete shock. We'll all have to pass out on our reclining platforms until we recover. And... I know I should probably just go, try to forget him, but... I can't leave him behind."

Even voicing the idea looked like it caused him pain. Dave would have thought that his experiences in the past few years might have cured him of feeling sorry for anyone else, especially a troll, but he did feel bad for the guy. He looked so resigned, like he was sure there was no hope but was determined to hang around in the hold of this stinking ship until he was caught.

Dave took a deep breath and prepared the best verbal assault he could. "Well, I can see why you'd feel like giving up, just you on your own against this entire ship with all her crew, but you've got me now. And they say two heads are better than one, but in your case one of those heads belongs to Dave fucking Strider, so our two heads are basically the equivalent of enough concentrated awesome to break out of Alcatraz while doing the Macarena and riding pogo sticks. I'd almost feel sorry for all the soldiers on this ship, I mean sorry in the normal human way, not your weird troll pitymance way, except I don't even feel that because they're pretty much all assholes, so..."

He was starting to wind down, and Karkat took the opportunity to interject, "You're a complete fucking idiot."

Dave smirked, because Karkat's scowl had the slight curve to his lips which said that he wasn't actually completely pissed off. "I'll take that as a 'thanks for your help, it's great to have you aboard.'"

He expected Karkat to respond in some suitably vitriolic manner, but he looked entirely too serious for that, and after a minute or two of quiet he said, "Do you know how Alternian spaceships are powered?"

"No," Dave said. The secrets of troll technology were not entrusted to their human captives.

Karkat rolled his eyes. "But you know some trolls have psionic power, right?"

"Sure," Dave said. "Mostly lowbloods, right?"

"Right," Karkat said, baring his teeth in something which looked almost like a snarl. "Some trolls can move things with their mind. Big things, massive things. Spaceship-sized things."

"Oh, fuck," Dave said, because he was beginning to see where this was going.

"But no one's crazy enough to volunteer to spend the rest of their lives pushing a ship through space with their minds. Believe it or not, it's not actually a whole lot of fun. So when trolls reach maturity, if they've got the ability they get conscripted to the fleet, tied into a ship's helmsblock with biotissue, and spend the rest of their lives there. They don't eat, or speak, or move. They just fly."

"Karkat..."

"And that's where Sollux is right now," Karkat said before Dave could offer any kind of sympathy. Just as well, because he had no idea what he'd say. "There's always a member of the crew with him. He's on the bridge, the busiest and most heavily guarded part of the ship. And even if we got him free, I'm not sure he... I'm not sure he'd be able to walk, or help us get away at all." He met Dave's gaze at last, his expression fierce, defiant. "You still so keen to help?"

Dave had to drastically re-evaluate his estimate of how difficult this would be, but still...

"There has to be a way," he said. Karkat looked at him incredulously. "I'm serious. There's no way these guys can have anticipated every possibility. We just have to think this through."

"Great," Karkat said flatly. "You go do that. I'll be busy over here, not getting my ass killed."


	2. Chapter 2

Dave spoke with a lot of bravado when he assured Karkat that they could rescue Sollux, but he was aware of the enormity of the task ahead of them. Still, when he lived on Earth, before everything went wrong, he was part of a highly successful resistance group . If anyone could do this, he could.

The first step was to learn everything they could. It was difficult, because Dave couldn’t risk being seen. He tried to have Karkat investigate the routines and people on board the ship, but it was only semi useful. Karkat tended to react to any new piece of information with cries of, "This is ridiculous, there's no way we can pull this off !" Still, they eventually built up a picture of a typical day on the bridge. The captain of the ship was up there through the night, trolls being the strange nocturnal creatures that they were. She was absolutely terrifying, a vicious olive-blood who'd tear out the throat of an underling as soon as look at them, and sometimes did exactly that.

In the morning and early afternoon the bridge was watched over by a lieutenant, young and inexperienced, but ambitious and diligent to a fault. No point going up against him.

In the evening the captain's second in command was on duty. He was a teal-blood, and Dave gathered from Karkat's remarks that he must be spectacularly incompetent to be made to answer to an olive-blood . This proved to be accurate; the 2i/c was lazy and too stupid to hide it well, and manned the bridge with a skeleton crew.

"That has to be our chance," Dave said. 

"Yeah, because busting Sollux out while only seven assholes are hanging around should be a walk in the fucking recreation field."

Dave had been making himself useful by breaking into the containers and looking for anything useful. Mostly they contained weapons, which was no surprise. Dave hadn't bothered with them before because he'd figured a weapon would be no use to him. If he ever got into a position where he needed one, he'd be royally fucked purely by virtue of being massively outnumbered on a tin can propelled through space by, apparently, an enslaved psionic. But now, to pull this mission off, he thought they'd need a bit of firepower. 

Some of the containers contained body armour; they took all they could carry. It wasn’t really built to human proportions, but it was close enough.

"Once we get Sollux out of there, what should we do?" Dave asked. "This ship has to have some kind of emergency.... escape pods, or something."

"You're not really filling me with confidence right now," Karkat grumbled, but he did add, "Yes, the ship is equipped with twelve individual transport vessels. Information which may be useful to us if we manage to get Sollux out of there without getting incinerated by blasters."

"Twelve, huh?" said Dave. "When you say individual, what do you mean? Are they strictly one-person type things, or could we all fit in one?"

"I'm not sure."

"We'll have to get close enough to take a look. And, assuming we'd all fit in one, we'll need to find a way to disable the others so they can't chase us. How are they powered? I assume they don't each have their own individual psionic."

"Of course not," Karkat intoned as though it was the dumbest question he's ever heard. Maybe it was. "They use bio-repulsion technology , but the boosters are only good for an hour or so before they need to recharge. We wouldn't get far in one."

"Well, that's the next problem, I guess. I suppose once the helmsman is removed, they won't have any way to control the course of this ship?"

"No."

"So if we can get Sollux, get on one of these escape pods-" He said it just to see Karkat sneer. "-and disable the others, they'll have no way of pursuing us, right?"

Now Karkat actually looked grudgingly impressed. "I guess not . Not until they get a replacement helmsman, anyway."

“How long would that take?”

Karkat shrugged. “At least a day, maybe two? I’m not sure.”

"Uh..." Dave hesitated, not sure how Karkat would react to his next suggestion. "When we get Sollux, do you think he'd be able to, you know, do his thing to our emergency vessel?" Karkat scowled ferociously and Dave held up his hands. "Just enough to get us somewhere safe! Just so we don't rescue him only to get him recaptured immediately."

Karkat looked calmer, but he was still shaking his head. "I have no idea what sort of shape Sollux will be in. He might not be capable of doing it, he might even be unconscious, or..." He cut himself off before suggesting anything else, but Dave could guess.

"Okay, we'll scratch that idea, I guess."

"Is there any point figuring out how to get away before we've even found a way to get him off the helmsblock?" Karkat demanded. Dave could argue the point, but it wasn’t worth the effort. 

"What will they do if there's a disturbance on the bridge?" Dave asked.

"Fill us full of laser holes, I presume."

"Come on, Karkat. If you want this to work, we need to be able to predict what's going to happen."

It turned out neither of them really knew what the procedure was for someone attacking the bridge. Dave wasn’t about to let that stop him; they’d just have to create an opportunity to observe for themselves. 

One of the containers held surveillance equipment, and another contained smoke bombs. Dave had no idea how the alien technology worked, but Karkat knew what to do.

"How can we get this stuff to the bridge?" Karkat asked. 

"Well, can't you take it and..."

"And what, waltz up to the bridge like I own the fucking ship? Believe it or not, they don't let just anyone up there."

Dave paused to regroup. "They must already have surveillance set up throughout the ship," Karkat offered after a minute . 

"Do you think we could hack into it?"

Karkat shook his head. "I'm actually - not that good at hacking," he said. The admission looked like it hurt him. "Sollux could do it in five minutes, but..."

"Who watches the security tapes?"

Karkat's brow furrowed, probably because he was trying to come up with the best derisive retort for the unforgivable humanism 'security tapes', but instead he snapped his fingers and said, "I've seen a room on one of the middle decks labelled 'security', I bet it's in there."

"Think you could charm your way in there?"

Karkat hesitated. "It'd be easier than getting up to the bridge," he said. "Still not _easy_ , mind you. I'll have to steal a full uniform. And we'll still have to get the smoke bomb up to the bridge somehow."

"Let me worry about that," Dave said.

It took them nearly a week to get ready. Actually, it took them about three days, and they spent another three days stalling because they were nervous. If something went wrong... even if they didn’t get caught, they could end up putting the whole ship on alert and ruining their chances of escaping in the future.

They couldn’t put it off forever, though. Eventually Karkat donned the crewtroll’s uniform he’d stolen from the laundry and headed out. Dave waited twenty minutes, then walked the other way.

He'd always kind of scoffed at all the stealth training his bro put him through, considered it less important than the combat skills he'd learned, but he sure was glad of it now. He was also glad that the ship's lieutenant was such a conscientious, predictable piece of shit, because it meant he knew that the guy sent one of his underlings to check up on the guards minding the ship's restricted areas at the same damn time every day.

Today, the task was given to a diminutive brown-blood, and Dave hid behind a waste receptacle and dropped the smoke bomb into her baggy pocket as she walked past. He held the switch which would let him detonate it remotely, and toyed with it nervously as he waited for thirty minutes to pass. Ten minutes for the troll to finish her patrol and make it back to the bridge, and twenty more so that no one would connect the smoke bomb to her tour of the ship. And even then, this whole exercise would be wasted if Karkat didn’t manage to get into the security room.

Dave didn’t let himself think about that, and also didn’t let himself drum his fingers or tap his feet while he waited. Striders didn’t fidget. He forced himself to wait, moving only to check the time, not allowing himself to hit the switch until exactly thirty minutes had passed.

Nothing happened for a minute or so, and then an alarm sounded. It wasn’t very loud - no speakers down here, in the hold. Dave was too far away to hear much of what was going on. He'd have been shocked that espionage could be so boring, but he wasn’t new to this. 

He waited.

He waited even when worry was twisting his guts into knots, because Karkat should be back by now, long back, and he wasn’t. He started towards the upper decks, wanting to look for him, then changed his mind because showing his face right now would be suicide. Then he did it all over again two minutes later. 

Karkat came back at last, hours after Dave was expecting him. He was so relieved he almost forgot to be cool. Almost.

"You're alive," he said.

"Of course I'm fucking alive. It took me forever to get back here because the whole ship is crawling with fucking trolls. Assholes."

"They didn't see you?"

"Of course not, I made it back, didn't I?" Karkat snapped and then added, "Oh, I see. You were worried."

"Yeah, worried that I'd done all that work for nothing. Where is it?"

Karkat had an infuriating, knowing smirk on his face, but he reached into his bag and pulled out the jar of six-legged bugs which trolls used to store digital information because they were incapable of designing normal technology. Dave looked at it warily.

"Handling that can be your job," he said.

"Naturally," Karkat snickered.

He'd found equipment to watch the recording on. A 'husktop', Karkat called it, essentially the same as a laptop aside from Alternia's preoccupation with making all its technology more or less alive.

"It didn't take them that long to realise it was just a smoke bomb, a false alarm," Karkat said, "but wow, that lieutenant sure flipped his shit when it first happened. I'm glad we got a recording."

Dave allowed himself to smile slightly, and focused on the video. Karkat went quiet as soon as it appeared on the screen, and Dave looked at the bridge. He could see what looked like windows with a view of the patch of space they were flying through, although on closer examination it turned out they were just monitors. Below them were large panels covered with complex-looking controls. Towards the back of the room was some kind of pillar with something wrapped around it. Ropes? Or maybe... tentacles? The quality of the recording wasn’t good enough for Dave to figure it out, but then Karkat glanced at that part of the screen and visibly gulped, and Dave felt the skin on the back of his neck crawl.

There was a long uneventful stretch at the start of the recording which Karkat fast-forwarded through, and then smoke began billowing out of the jacket Dave had dropped the smoke bomb into. The lieutenant's reaction did not quite live up to Karkat's hype; he saw the smoke, barked out some orders, and jabbed at some buttons on the control panel. 

"That triggers the alarm throughout the ship," Karkat said. "And now he's waking up the captain and telling her what's up."

Seven of the lieutenant's soldiers had taken up positions around the bridge, guarding the entrances, and one of them, Dave noticed, was watching the... the helmsblock. The remaining two were searching the bridge, fanning the smoke aside and looking for the source. They found it after a few minutes and doused it in water, and two minutes later the captain burst in with reinforcements. 

That was the end of the useful portion of the recording. The lieutenant explained what happened to the captain, who delivered some sort of general dressing down and then demanded to know where the smoke bomb came from . No one was willing to own up, and eventually the captain concluded that it was some sort of prank and stomped out after some vicious parting remarks.

"Okay," Dave breathed once it was finished.

"Is it?" Karkat asked sceptically.

"Yeah. Did you finish the other thing?"

"You mean this?" Karkat asked, pulling out the map he'd made using the security cameras.

"Yeah. Let's have a look..."

***

Dave wanted to find a way to disable the ship's various systems. If the doors were disabled, or at least the intercom network, they could prevent the soldiers from calling on reinforcements, and that would make things a lot easier. Karkat insisted it was far outside his capabilities, though, and Dave had to accept he was probably right. He’d seen Karkat try to write simple programs during the many, many hours they’d spent doing nothing much. He might be worse at coding than John. 

So, if that wouldn’t work, they’d need to find another way to disable their opposition. Get them away from the bridge without making them so suspicious they woke up the soldiers who were asleep. Dave had some ideas, but in the meantime...

"How hard will it be to actually get Sollux... get him out of there?" Dave asked. He'd been putting off asking Karkat that question, because he could tell the topic creeped him out. Hell, it creeped Dave out too. But they couldn’t put off thinking about it forever. If they were going to go through with this, they'd be face-to-face with the reality soon enough.

"I don't know," Karkat said, "but it'll probably be difficult."

Dave pointed to the screen where there was a still image of the bridge, Sollux's form only just visible at the back of the room. "How is he attached to the helmsblock? These look like ropes, can we just cut through them?"

"They're veins," Karkat said. 

"They're what?"

"You heard me," Karkat snapped, and yeah, this conversation was definitely making him uncomfortable. Well, too bad. "Veins. The ship is partly built from living tissue, and for a helmsman to interface with it they need to be connected. They're more like one organism than two separate beings."

Dave could feel his stomach slowly begin to churn, and resolutely ignored it. "How do we get him free without hurting him?"

"We don't," Karkat snapped.

"Okay, but... will this be dangerous? I mean, for him?"

"Yes. And for us as well. Sollux was... he _is_ a powerful psionic. He could pick us both up and toss us the length of this ship without breaking a sweat."

"Jegus," said Dave. 

"Hey, I told you that you shouldn't get involved. If you still want to bail, I'm not going to stop you."

"No way," Dave said. He wasn’t even sure why. It would be sensible, but the idea of backing out after coming this far was unthinkable. "How do we get him loose?"

"We'll have to cut him free, like you said."

"Jegus," Dave repeated, but Karkat didn’t yell at him this time.

***  


The night before they planned to carry out their mission, they both intended to get an early night, and both utterly failed to do so. Dave wasn’t sure what was keeping Karkat up, but if he was anything like Dave , it was probably terrifying predictions of everything going horribly wrong.

A week or so after Dave had volunteered to help Karkat rescue Sollux, they'd set up a new, shared base between the containers. It meant they'd have more time to plan together, Dave had said, and Karkat had added that they'd be able to pool their limited resources. If company had been a motivating factor, neither of them had admitted it.

So that was why, when Dave jerked awake for the third time that night, heart pounding and breath coming too fast, and he gave up on sleep and dragged himself upright, he saw Karkat sitting up against a container on the other side of the small space.

Their eyes met, and Dave knew that if either of them admitted to being scared, they'd lose the rest of their shaky courage.

"How do you and Sollux know each other?" he asked.

Karkat seemed puzzled at first, but he must have realised what Dave was doing, because rather than spilling a torrent of expletive-laden vitriol, he answered almost calmly.

"From Trollian, mostly. Oh, you won't know what that is... it's a chat client, you can use it on something called the troll internet, which.... Fuck, I don't know where to begin explaining basic fucking technology to your primitive ass."

"Thanks for trying, but we had the internet back on earth, actually," Dave said dryly.

"Oh, right, I forgot. Trolls have been there for, what, fifteen sweeps now?"

"Fuck you, we invented the internet ourselves, you guys didn't help at all," Dave snapped. He saw a small smirk on Karkat's face and realised he'd been played. "Smart-ass."

"How long until it's time?" Karkat asked.

Dave checked the time on one of the handheld devices Karkat had acquired. It was only mid-morning. The teal-blood would go on duty in about three hours, and they meant to wait a couple of hours after that to ensure that most of the crew was definitely asleep.

"Long enough to watch one of your shitty troll movies," Dave said, and Karkat took it as a suggestion . 

Somewhere in the middle of the rom-com, when the body count had just hit double digits (seriously, troll movies, what the _hell_?), Dave's desire to put off the inevitable and his desire to get it over with met in the middle, and he and Karkat headed out.

"Don't get your ass killed," Dave said, and then added, just in case Karkat mistook that for concern, "I can't get off this ship by myself."

Maybe Karkat saw through him, because he retorted, "I don't give a fuck if you die, so long as you help me get to Sollux first ." 

"Well," Dave said, "alright then."

The day before, they’d loaded up a low trolley with boxes of ammunition and piles of body armour, and now they dragged it through the ship's empty corridors until they reached a spot, a junction between two walkways, where there was a small alcove on one side and an empty office on the other. They could get a decent view in all directions from here, and there were places to hide in a pinch, although not for very long. Really, their whole plan relied on no one expecting there to be any problems.

They stopped by the security room along the way, where they switched off the cameras. No one ever seemed to monitor them anyway, but it reassured Dave to make certain that no one was watching him and Karkat wander around the ship.

The 2i/c had his underlings patrol the ship at intervals, just like the lieutenant did. The problem was, he wasn’t as regular about it. The incompetence they were depending on worked against them here, as they might have quite a wait before the first crew member came past.

They'd been in position for a good long time before they heard shuffling footsteps. Karkat was sitting on the trolley which was pushed up against the wall, doing a decent impersonation of a troll who was too drunk to notice or care that a superior officer was approaching behind him.

Dave shifted his grip on his blaster nervously. He and Karkat had talked about this. If their plan failed, none of these trolls would show the slightest hesitation in slaughtering them both. The whole ship was en route to bring supplies to an army fighting to subjugate an entire planet, just like they did to Earth. But...

But Dave had never killed before. Not even a troll.

The troll officer advanced on Karkat, bellowing, "What the hell are you doing out here in this condition, scumbucket!"

Dave fired. His aim was good; that, at least, he hadn’t forgotten. The troll dropped, a large wound in his back. He might live, and he might not, but he wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.

They dragged the troll into the office and tied his hands and feet, just in case. They locked the door and cleared away any evidence of the confrontation. There wasn’t much, a smear of brownish blood which they wiped up.

They stayed put, and continued to wait. Their observations had told them that the disappearance of the troll wouldn’t raise any alarms, not yet. The 2i/c was lax enough that the trolls he sent out to patrol occasionally took longer than they should, using the time to get a snack or play a game or squeeze in a quick nap. Occasionally they took too long, and the 2i/c would get pissed and send out a couple more trolls to track the loafer down and bring them back. This time, Karkat and Dave would be waiting for them.

It felt like a very long wait indeed, so much so that Dave worried the 2i/c wouldn’t bother to send anyone looking at all, and their whole plan would be for nothing, but every time he checked his watch he saw that only a few minutes had passed. It was actually a relief to hear the footsteps approaching, even though this was going to be more of a challenge than taking out the previous troll. 

They couldn’t use the same ploy again; they had to be ready to shoot at the same time so that there was no chance of one of the trolls raising the alarm. They waited for the trolls to pass and then slipped out into the passage behind them. Dave exchanged a glance with Karkat, who nodded, and he lifted his rifle.

He took aim, but he hesitated this time and it was almost their undoing. Karkat fired and one troll went down, but Dave was a second behind him and the other troll dodged to the side. His shot only grazed the troll's arm.

The troll looked at them, eyes huge, and fumbled for her communicator with one hand. Dave adjusted his aim, but she had long, wild dark hair and it looked so familiar ...

She fell back, yellow-green blood oozing from a hole in her forehead, and Karkat shouldered past him roughly.

"Come on, nookmuncher," he grumbled. "And don't hesitate like that again, if you want to not die."

With three of the trolls on duty taken out of action, there should be only four still on the bridge. Karkat and Dave had talked it over and agreed that when the pair of trolls didn’t come back, it would probably make even the 2i/c suspicious, so they needed to move quickly. 

Around the corner from the bridge, they parted ways. Karkat waited by the main entrance on the left side, while Dave moved around to another entrance which was smaller and more hidden. He was uncomfortably aware that Karkat was the one taking all the biggest risks in this plan, but it couldn’t be helped. The moment any troll saw him, they’d know something was wrong. They knew from watching the security footage that they would try to raise the alarm almost immediately. He had to stay out of sight as long as he could. 

Dave crept up towards the bridge. His heart was beating so hard he could probably drop some absolutely sick beats to the rhythm, but he kept his lips pressed firmly together and peeked tentatively through the doorway. 

No one was looking his way, and probably no one could hear him either, because an eerie wailing sound filled the space. It was coming from the helmsblock, and Dave could feel his unwilling gaze being dragged in that direction.

It was worse than it looked on the security cameras, with the poor picture quality and tiny screen size, and, most importantly, the lack of sound.

The ship's... veins... wrapped Sollux from head to toe. He wasn’t wearing any clothes that Dave could see. Veins coiled around his chest, his stomach, his hips. In some places there seemed to be several layers; in others, his skin showed through. To Dave's eyes it looked discoloured and irritated. Because he'd been struggling against the bonds? Was he even aware enough to do that? Dave wasn’t sure, because his eyes were solid in colour, one blue and one red, and he couldn’t tell where he was looking or decipher his expression.

Aware or not, he was definitely screaming. It was the strangest sound Dave had ever heard. He didn’t even really sound frightened or in pain, just like he was screaming because the possibility of not screaming wasn’t something he'd considered. The pitch and volume fluctuated according to some rhythm Dave couldn’t identify, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end .

The 2i/c shouted in the direction of the helmsblock, "Shut up! Yeah, we can all hear you, we just don't care." Then he turned to the others on the bridge and said, "I wish they'd just sew their sound holes shut when they install them, it's not like they need their mouths to eat ."

Dave tightened his grip on his blaster and thought that this time, he wouldn’t hesitate . 

He could just see the sleeve of Karkat's jacket through the other doorway, and he took aim. No more time to wait. Karkat stepped into the room and the other trolls all turned to look at him. Like they'd discussed, Dave shot the 2i/c before the trolls had time to realise Karkat wasn’t someone they knew. Karkat shot almost at the same time, and the troll nearest to him dropped. 

Dave stepped into the room and shot at one of the remaining trolls, but he reacted faster than he'd expected, ducking out of the way and returning fire so that Dave had to dodge for cover. He huddled just around the curve in the corridor and listened to the footsteps coming closer. Not fast, the troll was being cautious. Dave crouched down as silently as he could. He dove back through the doorway and the troll shot the wall several feet above his head. Dave, meanwhile, hit the troll in the foot, and, when he fell, followed it up with a shot to the head.

He heard crashing from the front of the bridge. He dragged himself upright and saw Karkat grappling with the remaining troll. Both their blasters were lying on the ground several feet away. The other troll had a knife on his belt, and he and Karkat were both trying to get hold of it without letting the other troll reach it first. They were right by the panel which Dave remembered, from the security footage, was used to communicate with other areas of the ship. The troll was trying to get to it, but Karkat was in his way. Karkat was smaller, though, and not as strong. Younger. 

Dave was still holding his blaster, but there was no way he could risk a shot now, the two trolls as close as they were. He plucked a knife from the belt of the troll he'd just killed, and ran towards them.

He reached them just as the other troll knocked Karkat's hand aside and dragged the knife free. Karkat's eyes were huge, the bright red colour of them never so obvious as now, and Dave imagined he could almost see the blade reflected in them. He grabbed the other troll's hair and put his own knife to his throat. And then, even though he'd have liked time, time to debate and panic and have second thoughts, he slit the troll's throat .

Pale orange blood spilled out and splattered over Karkat's clothes. He pushed the troll off and for a moment they just stood and gasped for breath.

"I don't think any of them contacted the captain," said Dave.

"Good. Come on, we still have to be fast."

Dave kept hold of the knife. He was going to need it. Karkat picked up the knife he'd been fighting the other troll for, and they both walked towards the helmsblock.

Towards Sollux. 

"Don't cut the veins too close to his body," Karkat said, and Dave responded with a grim nod. Once he got close enough, he almost couldn’t bring himself to touch the helpless, twitching body in front of him. Karkat showed no such hesitation; he put one hand on Sollux's shoulder and slashed with the knife. Mustard-coloured blood flowed from the severed veins.

Sollux's screams had quietened a little bit, but at the first touch of the knife his body began to thrash and he unleashed a series of ear-piercing, god-awful shrieks. It sounded like he was in pain, and Dave's stomach rolled.

"Come on, we need to hurry," Karkat snapped, and Dave nodded and got to work.

The veins looked rubbery, but when he touched them they were actually kind of slimy. He didn’t know what was coating them to give them that slick feeling, and he didn’t want to know. He started with the veins down around Sollux's feet, which were completely hidden. When he cleared them, Sollux's legs were stick thin and covered in bands of yellowish discolouration which might be bruising.

He worked his way up, and came close to losing what little he had in his stomach as he realised why Karkat warned him not to cut too close. The veins didn’t just hold Sollux in place, some of them...

Some of them _grew into_ him. Dave found one at his abdomen, near where his navel would be if he were human. Where it met Sollux's skin, there was a build-up of what might be blood, or something else, and the vein just went in ...

Dave swallowed hard and cut the vein a good foot away from where it entered Sollux's torso. Sollux gave a particularly agonised cry, and Dave had to stumble out of the way to vomit.

Fortunately for Dave - for all of them, really - Karkat had been working a lot more efficiently than he had, and by the time Dave was back on his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Karkat was preparing to sever the last vein.

"You ready?"

"Yes," Dave said, but he sounded sure of himself because he's had so much practice hiding any hint of his true reactions, not because he actually was. The last vein curled around Sollux's neck and disappeared into the base of his skull. It was probably for the best that Dave has already emptied his stomach.

"I fucking hope so, because this will set off alarms throughout the whole ship, so we're not going to have time to fuck around."

Several alarms were already beeping and flashing at the front of the bridge, but when Karkat slashed the last vein, a deafening siren began to sound. Sollux didn’t scream this time, but he sort of moaned, and that was somehow more alarming. Like he didn’t have the strength to cry out anymore.

"Come on, he can't walk, you need to help," Karkat said. Dave moved up to take Sollux's other arm, and they began to move, Sollux's feet trailing behind limply. This was the part of their plan which made the rest look easy. They needed to get from one end of the ship to the other while it was swarming with trolls and they were carrying Sollux . 

Actually carrying Sollux would look a bit strange, even if he didn't have the ends of the helmsblock veins sticking out of him and dripping yellow blood everywhere. That was why they’d brought the trolley; they loaded Sollux onto it and stacked blaster cartridges around him, covered him with armour and uniforms.

Dave pulled his hat low over his face and lifted the collar of his stolen jacket. He'd explained this part to Karkat so many times - act like you know what you're doing and you're where you're supposed to be, and no one will question you. But he wasn’t the one who had to pull this off, he was a human and he couldn’t draw attention to himself. Karkat was the one everything hinged on, and Dave wasn’t sure he was up to...

"You! Out of the way! Why are you even here, don't you know the captain's under fire two levels down?" Karkat barked at the first group of trolls to cross his path.

The trolls stumbled out of his way, and Karkat sped up, Dave breaking into a run to match his pace. The next handful of trolls they saw, Karkat bellowed, "Fucking finally! Don't you know we've been trying to call reinforcements up to the bridge for twenty minutes? Get the fuck up there and hold it down, for shit's sake." The next group after that, he said, "Hey, you! Yes, you! You're going the wrong way, there's a crime scene on the bridge, you need to get up there and make sure no one disturbs it! No, I can't do it, the captain needs these supplies straight away!"

Perhaps Dave's worries had been misplaced.

Of course, there were some circumstances where even the loudest, angriest asshole couldn’t successfully browbeat those around him into obedience. Three trolls stopped them just a few minutes away from the escape shuttles, demanding to know what they were doing there. Karkat insisted that they were on direct orders from the captain, who would be very interested to learn why they'd been delayed, and the tallest troll flipped up the visor on her helmet and said, "I find that difficult to believe, given that I am the captain ."

Oh, fuck. Karkat, bless him, drew himself up to his full but sadly unimpressive height, and said, " _You_? Haha! Arrest this impostor !"

The other trolls with the captain seemed unimpressed, even as Karkat launched into a tirade about what he was going to do to them which was loud, even for him. But at least their full attention was on Karkat, like they'd discussed, instead of on Dave, or Dave's human features, or the blaster he was surreptitiously pulling out. 

He tried to aim for the captain, but the shot went wild because he was trying to aim the blaster without holding it where the trolls could see it. They all dodged out of the way, reaching for their own weapons. Karkat must have been waiting for just that opportunity, because he drew his own blaster and took one of the trolls down seconds before he fired on Dave. Dave gave up on precision and just fired indiscriminately, but one of the trolls was pounding up the corridor bellowing at the top of their lungs, and the captain was...

The captain was pointing her blaster at him. By the time the possibility of dodging occurred to Dave, he couldn't give it his full attention because of the excruciating pain in his shoulder. She must have seen the bulk of the body armour under his clothes, and aimed directly for the shoulder joint. Smart.

Dave collapsed against the trolley, sure he was about to die, and the captain fell, her eyes vacant and blood dripping down her face.

Karkat - of course it was Karkat who'd shot her - was apparently not satisfied, and shot her again, and then again, snarling , until Dave said, "Karkat? C'mon, Karkat, we don't have time."

Karkat kicked the body aside and grabbed at Dave. "Get on the trolley."

Dave could walk, he was sure he could walk, but moving hurt a lot and maybe riding the trolley wasn't such a bad idea. Karkat pushed it along and Dave felt every bump in the floor. He blinked and when he opened his eyes Karkat was lifting him through some sort of hatch. There was a seat in front of him and Dave settled into it gratefully. He blinked again and suddenly Sollux was next to him, one more blink and a feeling of weightlessness overtook him. It was kind of nice, and Dave leaned back against the seat and let his eyes stay closed.

Much later - or maybe it was only a few minutes, he couldn't tell - a hand shaking his shoulder demanded Dave's attention. He opened his eyes reluctantly and Karkat scowled down at him.

"Wake up, asshole, we need to figure out how badly you're injured,'" he said.

"It doesn't hurt as much anymore," Dave said, trying to reassure him, but Karkat only glared.

"Fuck," he said. "Well? Are you going to take off your shirt, or do you want me to undress you too ?"

Dave moved to flip Karkat off, but a stab of pain in his shoulder reminded him that he was still injured, even if he'd been able to ignore it for a while. He managed to get his hoodie off, although Karkat did have to help him a little bit, and he did most of the work to get the body armour off. Karkat cut his t-shirt off while Dave grumbled, because it wasn’t like he had so many spares he could just afford to toss clothes out willy-nilly .

"Quit complaining," Karkat ordered. "I need your help to look after Sollux, so we have to get you patched up."

Dave shut up. The wound on his shoulder had bled a lot, but had mostly stopped now. Remembering the rudimentary first aid he knew, Dave checked that he could move his fingers and then tried to lift his arm.

"Stop that, what the fuck is wrong with you? You're gonna start it bleeding all over again."

They decided that the damage probably wasn’t too bad, that nothing was broken and it should heal with time. Karkat put a pad over the wound and wrapped some cloth around it to hold it in place. He fashioned a makeshift sling out of Dave's former t-shirt and made Dave wear it. Dave thought his shoulder should really have stitches, but he wasn’t entirely comfortable with Karkat sewing him up, and he settled for keeping the shoulder as still as he could.

"Are we out of range of the ship?" Dave asked.

"I'd imagine so. You might have noticed we haven't been blown up yet."

"Just checking."

"Help me over here."

'Over here' meant where Sollux was still slumped down against the seat. It didn’t look like he'd moved at all, which worried Dave because he was obviously still able to move before they took him off the helmsblock. He looked dead, aside from the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest.

Dave and Karkat had talked about this . The ends of the veins that were still attached to Sollux needed to be removed. Dave had listened to Karkat's explanation but not really understood. He'd imagined the veins like leeches which latched on and had to be removed, not like... this .

Some of them weren’t grown in all that deeply. One firm but gentle tug and they came free. Others weren’t so easy. Like weeds. Some of them, when they were removed, turned out to split into smaller and smaller strands, like roots growing into the dirt. They must have divided up like that inside Sollux's body, wrapped around his muscles and arteries and organs, and Dave wondered how he could possibly survive this. There should be an entire team of doctors trying to put him back together right now, not just him and Karkat.

The big one behind Sollux's head, even Karkat seemed reluctant to touch, and he'd been attacking the others with his claws and knife and stomping them underfoot once they're out for good measure, like they'd personally offended him. Which Dave supposed maybe they had.

At least Sollux didn’t seem too worried about what they were doing. Occasionally he twitched and mumbled, but there was nothing like the uncontrollable thrashing when they'd first cut him free.

Eventually, they'd done as much as they could. Dave knew they hadn’t removed everything. The biggest veins went too deep and had too many branches. Some, they removed as much as they could while leaving the smallest veins broken off inside . The biggest veins, like the one at the back of Sollux's head, they simply trimmed down until they didn’t stick out too much and otherwise left alone. Way too much risk of doing serious injury if they tried to pull those out. Still, Dave thought there was an excellent chance of Sollux dying from an infection before they got anywhere near anyone who could treat him.

It was done, and Dave wiped at the yellowish blood on his hands with distaste. He knew there was water on board, but they needed to save as much as they could for drinking. He splashed a small amount on his hands to get the worst of the mess off. That would have to do for now .

"Where are we?" he asked when he couldn’t put it off anymore. The one thing they’d been worried about when they were making their plans was getting out of range of the ship’s guns. They'd agreed to put a burst of speed on to get out of reach and disable the navigation systems which communicated with the main ship. They hadn’t been boarded yet, so Dave assumed Karkat must have done that and taken them off the main ship's radar, but it also meant they were completely lost. Lost in all the vast featureless infinity of space. It would make him want to scream if he wasn't such an expert at being cool.

"I think we started out in the direction of the Galarian system," said Karkat. “But we ran out of juice a little while ago. Did you feel it?"

Dave hadn't. He'd had other things on his mind.

"We'll have to turn the navigation systems back on at some point, but that means they'll be able to find us. By now, they will have called for assistance . They'll be looking for us. They can’t come after us because we wrecked their individual vessels, but they can tell other ships where we are. We should wait until the bio-repulsor recharges , turn the systems on, set our route and turn it off again straight away. If we're fast enough, maybe they won't notice. But..."

"If they've got any sense at all, they'll have to realise we're headed for the Galarian system, and the closer we get, the harder it will be to sneak through the Alternian forces," Dave observed. Karkat nodded solemnly.

"We can make our route more erratic and try to confuse them, but our supplies won't last forever and the longer we spend out here, the longer we have to keep being lucky enough to avoid getting caught."

"Right," Dave said. Put like that, it didn’t sound all that promising. "So, do we try to race them, or hide from them?"

"The longer we take, the more time they'll have to plan," Karkat said. "We can't afford to be slow, but we can't outrun them either. They've probably already warned their forces on Mennara to look for us. The second we fall into that planet's orbit, they'll be on our ass."

Karkat's gaze lingered on Sollux for a moment, and Dave understood what he was reluctant to say. If Sollux was to have any chance of surviving at all, they couldn't afford to take their time.

"What about the resistance on Mennara? Will they notice if we enter its orbit?"

"Maybe," Karkat said.

"Or can we get a message to them, ask for their help?"

"Maybe," Karkat repeated, more reluctantly this time. Dave got it; from what he'd seen, trolls in general weren't much into helping each other out. But Karkat looked at Sollux again and nodded.

"You're right, it's the only way," he said. "We'll have to be a bit closer to Mennara first, and we won't be moving at all for a couple of hours. We've got some waiting to do ."


	3. Chapter 3

"Resistance fighters of Mennara? Resistance fighters of Mennara? This is a distress call from three fugitives from Alternia ."

Waiting to get in range of the planet’s communication systems had been as boring as hell, but Dave had done his best to enjoy it because he knew that this was what would follow: uncertainty, terror, and the strong possibility of painful, gruesome death.

Karkat had spent the quiet parts of their journey trying to wake Sollux up. Unsuccessfully, as far as Dave could tell, although every so often Sollux had sighed or fluttered his eyelids, and Karkat had babbled loudly about how this was a sure sign that Sollux was on the brink of consciousness, that he knew Karkat was there, that he was trying to say his name...

It had been getting on Dave's nerves, if he was honest, and didn't that just make him a legendary piece of shit? Karkat had just rescued his childhood friend from a fate worse than death, of course he wanted to stay near Sollux and had no time for anyone else . 

It had been about six hours, by Dave's reckoning, and they'd drawn closer to Mennara in bursts. They’d kept their communications system offline for the most part, but it was linked with the navigation system so they’d had to use it a few times to make sure they were still on course. Each time, they’d risked being detected by an Empire ship, but they’d been lucky so far. That was sure to change now, though. They'd need to keep their communicators online for at least a few minutes to get in touch with Mennara's resistance .

"Come in, Mennara," Karkat repeated, beginning to sound frantic. "Three Alternian fugitives, requesting assistance. Over."

There was a minute of agonising silence, and then the quality of the silence changed, the slight fuzziness Dave hadn't even noticed giving way to a heavy quiet interrupted only by faint clicking.

"Identify yourselves," came a demand through the communicator's speakers.

Karkat opened his mouth, paused, and said, "Are you with the resistance?"

"We don't have time for games, grub. Identify yourselves, or you're on your own."

Dave could see Karkat heading for one of his customary rants, but that wouldn't help them right now. He shouldered Karkat aside, ignoring his shout of protest, and pressed the transmit button. "Our names are Karkat and Dave," he said. "And we've got a... a helmsman with us. He needs medical attention."

"You're telling her too much!" Karkat snapped, but Dave merely shrugged. If they weren't actually speaking to the resistance, or they decided not to help, they were screwed no matter how much they revealed. No point holding anything back. 

Still, the revelation seemed to have floored whoever they were speaking to, because it was a good ten seconds before they got any response.

"A _helmsman_?" the voice demanded. "How many Alternian ships do you have chasing you right now ?"

"None!" Karkat snapped.

"Don’t lie. How many?"

"None that we know of," Karkat amended sulkily.

"Well, isn’t that fantastic. Do you have any idea..."

But what they allegedly had no idea of, they never found out, because at that point the transmission faded out, and after a burst of static, a new voice began to speak.

"This is Her Imperious Condescension's ship The Flayer. You are ordered to surrender. Give up the human and the helmsman, and your death will be swift."

"Fuck, they're onto us!" Karkat gasped. He flailed at the controls while Dave steeled himself.

“Karkat...”

“Don’t. Whatever you’re about to say, don’t.” Karkat switched back to the previous channel. "Uh, sorry about that," he said, sounding shaken and, for Karkat, quite genuinely apologetic. "We can now safely say there's at least one ship after us."

“I’m shocked,” the troll answered, her voice thick with sarcasm. "And you're on an empire vessel, which means it won't be equipped with resistance encryption, which means we can't encrypt what we send you, so they probably know everything we're telling you."

“Maybe we can piss them off enough they’ll just blow up the ship,” Dave whispered.

“Shut up. No, they won’t, Sollux is too valuable to them.” Karkat cleared his throat and spoke up for the benefit of the troll on the communicator. “Are we fucked?”

Dave heard the troll sigh, but she was at least merciful enough to spare them another rant about how badly they’d fucked up. "We have your location pinpointed. In ninety seconds, we're going to send you new trajectory figures. You make the adjustments and go that way as fast as you can. You don't ask questions and you don't try to contact us again. We'll send our people out to pick you up. Understood ?"

"Perfectly," Karkat said, his voice faint.

"And understand this. If a single one of our people gets injured on this rescue farce, I'll personally ensure that they get justice. I’ll make you wish you'd let the empire catch you."

The transmission cut out without ceremony, and Dave and Karkat looked at each other. Just when Dave thought he’d come up with a clever comment about their situation and could probably say it without sounding scared or panicked, a loud chime sounded from the console. Karkat opened a document which contained nothing but a long string of Alternian numerals.

"What the fuck do we do with those?" Dave asked. Karkat shook his head, frowning, but he seemed to have an idea of what to do and began entering the digits into the routing program. 

“Something about these figures seems off,” Karkat muttered.

“Are you sure?”

“No, you festering asscactus. I’m not a pilot, I know lots of fuckall about space navigation. I just... don’t trust that troll we were talking to. And I don’t think this is going to take us closer to Mennara; the planet designation is too far down the string.”

Dave looked at the figures himself, even though they meant even less to him than they did to Karkat. It didn’t matter anyway. It had been made amply clear that contacting the resistance again was not an option. Dave moved to Karkat's side and looked at what he'd typed in.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Dave said, doing his best to sound supportive. Karkat stared flatly at him, unimpressed. “I guess if they’ve sold us out, we can just open the entry hatch. Asphyxiation is probably a better way to go than whatever they’ll do to us.”

“So fucking reassuring,” Karkat muttered. With a decisive stab at the console, he started the ship moving. It changed direction sharply and moved so fast Dave imagined he could see the stars blurring.

"We're heading away from the planet. There's nothing out here but an asteroid belt," Karkat snapped. He kicked at the floor.

"An asteroid belt?” Dave asked, and like he tended to do when he was worried or uneasy and trying to hide it, he began to ramble. “How big are these asteroids? Like, as big as the state of Texas, or more like ..."

"What the fuck are you talking about? It doesn't fucking matter. We won't get that far, and there's no one coming for us. She gave us that trajectory to get us away from Mennara and lead the empire ships away from them."

It was a horribly plausible possibility, but Dave tried to cling to hope. "I don't know, I'm not sure she’d pass up the opportunity to kick our asses in person. Don't give up yet."

Karkat grimaced, but he must have realised the same thing Dave had: if the Mennaran resistance was coming for them, they had to follow their instructions to the letter. If not, they were fucked no matter what they did. Their only option was to stay on course and hope help was coming.

More waiting. All this waiting was turning Dave into one impatient bastard. If they got out of this, he would live off hot pockets and instant noodles and fast food so he’d never have to wait for anything ever again .

Actually, that would just be business as usual for him. Never mind .

Deep down, Dave knew he was expecting an empire ship to turn up at any moment. They'd shut the communicators down again, so the only warning they'd have of an approaching vessel was through the proximity sensors. Their purpose was more to detect space detritus than other vessels, but they would probably detect a ship long before it became visible to the naked eye. Even so, Dave felt glued to the front window, scanning the view from one side to another and back again.

At some point, Dave started rambling, speculating about how likely their ship was to be obliterated by an asteroid before anyone came to get them, and how the mass of said asteroid might compare to, say, Jupiter. He was pretty sure he was driving Karkat steadily closer to committing messy, brutal murder, but couldn’t seem to stop the nonsense spilling from his mouth, until finally, the proximity sensors lit up.

He and Karkat both dove for the display and narrowly avoided banging their heads together, which wouldn't have ended well for Dave given Karkat's horns.

"What is that?" Dave asked. "A resistance ship? Or is it..."

"No way to be sure," Karkat said. "Not unless we send a transmission to them, which we can’t." He studied the moving blob on the display and added, "It doesn't look very big. I think an empire ship would be bigger."

He didn't sound confident of that, though, and Dave allowed himself to bite his lip for a few seconds before resuming his unaffected facade. It didn't provide much relief . 

The ship drew alarmingly close before they could make out the details of its hull. It looked patchy, like it had been repaired many times from spare parts, and there was no empire insignia on it. "I don't believe it," Karkat said. "They really did come. We're safe!" He grinned at Dave, then knelt down next to Sollux. "We saved you, Sollux. You're safe now!"

And for just a moment, Dave was sure he saw Sollux's eyes open.

***  
Chapter 4  
They left the escape pod behind. Dave was almost sad to see it go. Almost. A handful of trolls boarded it and scavenged as many usable parts as they could in fifteen minutes, then left explosives on board and remotely detonated them once they were a safe distance away.

Dave watched the proceedings with interest, admiring the efficiency with which the trolls operated. It was very different to the lumbering, unresponsive crew of the cargo ship . It reminded him of how the rebels he’d grown up with had worked together, Jane and Jake especially. They’d barely needed to talk to each other to get things done.

Karkat had refused to leave Sollux's side, even though Dave was pretty sure the troll doctor wished he would.

"Is he going to be okay?" Karkat demanded.

"This sort of thing doesn't happen very often. Only a handful of helmsmen have been liberated after installation, and most of them...." The troll doctor hesitated, but only briefly. Sparing people's feelings didn’t seem to be something which trolls did. "Most of them did not survive."

Karkat's expression hardened. "Sollux isn't going to die."

"We're going to do everything we can for him."

"He opened his eyes earlier."

"That's a good sign, but what he really needs at the moment is my undivided attention."

That hint was pointed enough to penetrate through even Karkat's worked up state of mind. He let Dave guide him a few steps away, although he wouldn't let Sollux out of his sight. 

The rescue vessel took them, not to the surface of Mennara, but to a space station just inside the orbit of the asteroid belt. Someone cleaned up Dave's shoulder and put a sterile dressing over it, and they were met after docking by even more doctors and assorted medical personnel. It was only when one of them asked Dave, for the third time and in an incredulous tone of voice, whether he was sure he had no other injuries, that he considered that they might have pulled off something pretty extraordinary .

Sometime later, when Dave was unenthusiastically consuming a plate of semi-edible food, Karkat was taking a nap (oh, excuse him, _resting his eyes_ ), and Sollux was doing whatever he'd been doing since he was rescued, an unfamiliar troll stomped into the medical centre, feeling her way around obstacles by tapping a cane . Dave thought the cane might be redundant; given the way she was stomping around, any person or inanimate object with a sense of self-preservation would do well to clear a path for her .

She made her way straight towards them and stared at Dave and Karkat, something which was no less intimidating for the fact that it was slightly off-centre. "You’re the two we just rescued, aren’t you?” she demanded. “They said you were in here.”

"You're the one we were talking to earlier, before we got rescued," Dave realised. "Are you here to enact our grisly demise? Because the medical guys just got done patching us up."

The troll glowered at him. "No, smartass," she snapped. "Lucky for you, no one was hurt dragging your sorry asses out of trouble." She swept her cane around until it found the leg of a chair, dragged it closer to herself and sat down. Unfortunately she seemed every bit as intimidating while seated.

"Hooray," Karkat said. He still looked mostly asleep and therefore grumpier than usual, otherwise Dave liked to think he would have thought better of antagonising the person who had both rescued and threatened them.

The other troll grinned nastily. "To try to prevent you from being followed, we transmitted over three thousand possible trajectories, and deployed fifteen decoy vessels to draw the empire ships away from your destination. Each of those vessels was crewed by ten resistance fighters. That is how many resources and lives we put at risk to save your asses, so do you think you could lower yourselves to expressing the slightest bit of gratitude ?”

Dave glanced at Karkat and could see his mood shifting from cranky to downright peeved. "We are grateful," he said quickly before Karkat could open his mouth. "We thought we were going to die ."

"Good," said the other troll, but whether she was responding to Dave's profession of gratitude or his fear of death, Dave couldn't tell. "I've heard your helmsman friend is in pretty good condition, considering."

"Considering we had to literally cut him free from the helmsblock, sure," Karkat said.

"So that part was true. I had my doubts," she said, and Karkat sneered at her. “I heard you had to fight your way out, too,” she said, her fingertips unerringly finding the edge of Dave’s sling . "But you all got out alive. That's impressive."

For a second, Dave was sure he had misheard. "That almost sounded like a compliment."

"Don't get me wrong, I still think you're both terrible. But we could use people in the resistance who can do what you two just did."

Dave and Karkat exchanged a glance. Dave couldn’t be sure what Karkat was thinking, but the idea of going through anything like the last twenty-four hours again was terrifying. But still...

"We want to help the resistance," Dave said. He hoped Karkat wouldn’t mind being included in that 'we '. He at least didn’t make a fuss about it, and Dave knew him well enough by now to know that he wasn’t shy about speaking up when something pissed him off.

"Good," she said, standing up . "Because you owe us."

***

The troll's name was Terezi. She was a teal-blood, and about Karkat's age. She wasn’t quite as abrasive as their first encounters had led Dave to believe. In fact, she turned out to be quite informative .

The empire knew that this space station was in orbit around Mennara, but between its hefty defences and the cloaking technology which kept them from pinning down its exact location, they’d never really tried to attack it.

"We keep them pretty busy down on the planet's surface," Terezi told them one day. "They don't bother about us up here too much."

"Will we be sent down there?" Dave asked.

"Probably," Terezi said. 

There wasn’t much space on the station; definitely not much for a trio of civilians who weren’t in any shape to be pulling their weight yet. As a result, the three of them slept cramped into the one small room in the medical centre, even though Dave and Karkat were probably well enough to be discharged. 

Karkat spent most of his time sitting by Sollux's convalescing surface, which was what the trolls called the thing he laid on because trolls didn’t sleep in beds. The doctors didn’t seem to think he was going to die anymore, but he still hadn’t woken up.

Dave spent a lot of time wandering around the station, bothering Terezi and anyone else who stood still long enough. He was on his way back to the room to check in on Karkat one evening , and heard sobbing as he approached it. Stomach lurching unpleasantly, he ran inside and found Karkat leaning against the bed, bawling.

Sollux's eyes were open. They were open, and he was blinking almost constantly. His fingers were twitching at his sides, and his mouth hung slightly open, but he made no sound and didn’t reach towards Karkat. 

He looked terrified.

Dave stepped into the room and Sollux caught sight of him. He looked even more frightened and confused. Had he ever even seen a human before? Dave wanted to leave, but he needed to help, didn’t he? Karkat needed him. Sollux needed him, even if he didn’t want him there .

Keeping his hands in view, Dave moved to Karkat's side and patted his shoulder gently. "Hey," he said. "It's okay. This is good, right?"

"He doesn't..." Karkat sniffed and wiped his face. He folded his arms and tucked his red-stained hands out of sight, and Dave pretended not to notice, even though his red blood hadn’t been a secret since the doctors had patched them all up when they arrived. "I don't think he remembers. Anything."

Looking at Sollux's perplexed expression, Dave found that all too plausible. Still, how frightening must it be to wake up in an unfamiliar place with someone crying over you like you were dying? Who knew what was going through Sollux's head right now. They had to try to treat him normally.

'Normally'.

Dave sat down next to Karkat, keeping a hand on his shoulder, and gave Karkat a nod. "Hi," he said. "My name's Dave."

Like he'd hoped, Sollux seemed to calm down. He looked more confused, but less scared. Karkat seemed to relax as well, maybe because with Dave taking charge it was no longer up to him to know what to do.

The trouble with that was that Dave didn’t know what to do either. "This is Karkat," he tried. "Do you know Karkat?"

Sollux's mouth moved again, and this time Dave was pretty sure he was mouthing words. If only he could read lips.

"What about," Dave said, already mentally congratulating himself for the idea , "you blink once for yes and twice for no?"

In response, Sollux blinked seven times. Dave had forgotten about his blinking issue. Was there something wrong with Sollux's eyes? Aside from how strange they looked in general, of course.

"Or," he said, scrambling to find an alternative, "instead of that, maybe you can tap my hand. Can you tap my hand?"

He shoved his right hand, palm up, under Sollux's where it rested on the bed. Sollux's fingers immediately stilled, and then he tapped once, deliberately, right in the middle of Dave's palm.

"Awesome!" Dave said. He reminded himself to grin; Sollux needed the reassurance, and probably so did Karkat. "See that, Karkat?"

Karkat's sobs had ceased, although tears continued to run down his face. He nodded.

"Do you know me?" Dave asked. Sollux frowned and tapped twice. Dave smiled again; his face was getting a real workout today .

"That's right," he said. "We've never met before. My name's Dave. And... I guess you can't really tell me your name. Don't feel up to talking yet?" He paused, just in case Sollux did decide to say something. His lips parted again, and he licked at them briefly, but made no sound . 

"That's okay, though," said Dave. "Actually, I know your name already. Do... um, do you remember it?"

Sollux tapped once, slow and uncertain. Dave wasn’t sure if he actually remembered or if he was just trying to please them.

"It's Sollux," he said. "That's your name."

Sollux tapped again, with a little more confidence this time, but he was still frowning. Dave decided to take it as a positive sign anyway, and gestured to Karkat. 

"Do you know who this is?"

Sollux was slow to respond. He had to move his head to see Karkat, and he seemed kind of reluctant to do so. Maybe because it was physically difficult for him, or maybe he just didn’t want to look away from Dave. Karkat didn’t help or anything, didn’t move into Sollux's field of vision. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to what Dave was doing at all, just staring gloomily down at his hands. 

When Sollux finally looked over at Karkat, there was no following tap on Dave's palm. He looked back at Dave, back at Karkat. He lifted his fingers up, then placed them back on Dave's hand much too gently for it to be considered a tap.

"This is Karkat," Dave said when he couldn’t stand it anymore. "Karkat. He's your friend."

Sollux tapped once, but he wouldn’t look at either of them and this time Dave was sure he was just telling them what they wanted to hear.

"Well," Dave said. He needed to change the subject. "Are you... do you feel okay? Are you in pain?"

Two taps, no hesitation. At least that was something.

"Do you want... food? Or something to drink?"

Dave wasn’t sure Sollux was even supposed to be eating anything, but, hey, there was a pitcher and a glass by the bed, so some water should be safe, right?

Sollux didn’t respond until Dave actually reached out and picked up the pitcher with his free hand. Then he tapped, not once or twice but dozens of times, more than Dave could count, showing no regard for the whole one for yes two for no arrangement 

"Okay, okay," Dave said. "Here, I need my hand back so I can pour you a cup."

Dave poured the water, and then realised that Sollux probably couldn’t drink it lying on his back. "Karkat," he said.

"Huh?"

"Karkat, come on. I need your help."

Between them, they got Sollux propped up against some pillows, and Dave thought he might be trying to lean forward as he approached with the water.

"Okay," he said. "Take it easy."

Sollux either didn’t understand him, or didn’t care. Dave had to take the water back after a few sips, worried that Sollux would choke or make himself sick. He seemed to be a bit rusty on the whole swallowing concept, as water spilled down his chin and soaked the thin grey gown he was wearing. This time, Sollux actually managed to hiss angrily as Dave pulled the cup away. So, that was good, at least now they knew they didn't remove his vocal cords or whatever trolls used to talk.

Fuck.

"I'll give you some more in a second," Dave said. "But you've got to breathe, too."

Sollux shoved his elbows hard into the pillows, pushing his head and shoulders forward a few inches. At the same time, a flicker of red and blue light which Dave had learned to recognise as psionics curled around the glass, tugging it forward. Dave held on tight but it had all happened too suddenly; the glass jerked in his hand spilling the water over the blankets. Sollux, who had been holding his position with trembling arms, slumped back onto the pillows with an expression of crushing disappointment

"Oh, jeez, it’s okay," Dave said. “Look, I’m pouring another glass. Take it easy.” 

He helped Sollux drink another glass, a few sips at a time. Sollux became better at getting the water into his mouth, and the air of urgency about him diminished. 

Once the cup was empty, Dave asked, "How's that? Better? There's more, but..."

He wasn’t sure how much water Sollux should really have. It was probably past time they got a doctor in here, but Sollux had looked alarmed when Dave entered the room, and he was a lot less intimidating than some of the trolls around the place.

"I think we should get a doctor to come in and check up on you," Dave said. If he was honest with himself, he was hoping Karkat would step up soon and take over, but he showed no sign of doing anything like that. "Sollux, would that be okay? If one of the doctors here came in to make sure you're okay?"

From Sollux's expression, he was thinking, hard. He opened and closed his mouth again. Too late, Dave realised he hadn’t given his hand to Sollux, but before he could think about grabbing his hand again, Sollux looked him in the eye for the first time. Dave had thought he wouldn't be able to tell where Sollux was looking, with his eyes, but he could. He could feel it. Feel the hairs lifting on the back of his neck.

"Protocol not found," Sollux rasped .


	4. Chapter 4

Sollux waking up and speaking appeared to be the signal that it was time to move them down planetside. They were due to board a shuttle in three days time.

"We're not really equipped for long term housing of civilians ," Terezi explained when Dave questioned the decision. "This station's purpose is mainly defensive."

Dave didn’t want to admit that he was going to miss Terezi , walking around the station with her and making up ridiculous stories about the other people they encountered. Sometimes they illustrated the better stories, and Dave knew he could keep doing that without Terezi but it wouldn’t be the same. Perceptive as she was, Terezi leaned over and licked a stripe along the left side of his chin. _Gross_. 

"Don't worry," she said, handing over a scrap of paper. "This is my trollian handle. You should make an account as soon as you get settled, that way we can chat online."

"Cool, thanks."

"You can pass that on to Karkat too, if he wants it, " Terezi added. "And if he ever leaves Sollux's side again. He's not terrible company, I guess, when he's taking a break from shouting.”

Karkat had, to Dave's knowledge, let Sollux out of his sight twice since he woke up; once to use the load gaper, and once, after much urging, to take a shower. He barely reacted to the news that they were going to be moved, except to check that Sollux would be staying with them.

Sollux. Just thinking about him made Dave’s head hurt. Maybe it made him a bad person, but it was always kind of a relief to get away from Sollux for a while. Never for that long, though, because he seemed to have latched onto Dave. Maybe he could tell that Dave wasn’t invested in his recovery the same way Karkat was . Whatever the reason, it felt like Sollux needed him.

He still didn’t talk much, but he would respond to yes or no questions as long as they were fairly simple. He strung the occasional sentence together; always in present tense and no more than five words, and it usually took him several attempts to get it out.

The doctors had set out a series of exercises for him to do, intended to gradually build up his muscles and restore normal movement. Karkat had taken charge of that and followed the regime to the letter . He seemed to find it easier than the fraught task of drawing Sollux out of his shell.

Actually, the doctors didn’t seem to have much idea of what to do there, either. Dave got the impression it wasn’t really a priority for them; they seemed to think Sollux would either recover on his own, or he wouldn’t.

So, Dave was unsurprised to learn that Sollux would accompany them down to Mennara. He couldn’t imagine any of the trolls up on the space station volunteering to take care of him . Karkat wouldn’t have stood for that anyway. It looked like the three of them would be staying together, which was fine with Dave.

The shuttle they eventually boarded was cramped. There were a handful of other trolls on board; they didn’t say what their business was on Mennara, and Dave didn’t ask. Most of the space on board, though, was taken up by _stuff_. Crates of random things, weapons and food but also medical supplies and technological devices and components Dave couldn’t identify. With all that put together, there was barely enough room for the wheelchair Sollux was sitting in.

Sollux himself seemed scared. This was the first time he'd been further than the corridor outside his room, and the most trolls he'd seen at once. They mostly ignored him aside from the occasional curious glance. Sollux, for his part, stared openly at them, his breath coming a little too fast. Karkat held his hand, and Sollux clung to it, but it didn’t seem to help much.

Dave crouched in front of Sollux's chair, trying to get the troll to look at him rather than the strangers. "Hey," he said, "are you alright?" 

Sollux didn’t seem to take the question in, and Dave rephrased it with a slight grimace . "What's your status?"

Above him, Karkat growled, but Dave ignored him. Sollux said, "Within acceptable. Pa. Para... parameters."

This was the only thing he ever said when asked how he was, but at least he was talking, responding. And then he continued, "Is. Is. Is?"

It was unusual for Sollux to initiate a sentence at all, never mind when he was this stressed, so Dave remained in his crouch even though his calves were beginning to burn and plastered on an encouraging smile. "Is what?"

"Test," Sollux said. "This test. Is test?"

Under better circumstances, Dave might have pushed Sollux to phrase the question more clearly, but things being what they were, he just said, "Is this a test?"

Sollux nodded. Dave wished he’d stalled a bit more; he wasn’t sure how to answer the question. Sollux always seemed to think along strange curving lines that he couldn’t anticipate, so talking to him was challenging..

"No, this isn't a test," he said. Sollux blinked at him. Dave couldn’t tell whether Sollux believed him or not. His expression only ever changed under the direst of circumstances. He was pretty sure Sollux understood him, though.

It was strange, how his ability to use language had changed. Or at least, how Dave assumed it must have changed. He didn't know Sollux before, but from Karkat's reactions he knew Sollux was dramatically altered from how he used to be.

He couldn’t follow long or complex sentences. As far as Dave could tell, he seemed to lose track if too much information came at him once, and stop trying to listen. But his vocabulary still seemed quite broad, something they’d discovered when the doctor had come in to update Dave and Karkat on Sollux’s condition. He’d talked over Sollux as though he couldn’t hear, but Dave had picked up on the slight changes to Sollux’s expression which had followed in time with the doctor’s words . Sollux could understand and even use words whose meaning Dave had to look up, although actually speaking seemed to be hard for him.

Dave was pretty sure that was a physical thing. Sollux’s words often sounded a bit slurred, and he had a lisp. From Karkat he knew that Sollux had always lisped, but it was more pronounced than it used to be. It could be hard to understand him, and sometimes they would have to get Sollux to repeat himself several times before they knew what he was trying to say. The effort of speaking always seemed to wear Sollux out. It was no wonder he tried to express himself with as few words as possible.

Still, Sollux mustered the will to try speaking once more. "Comply," he said.

"Huh?" said Dave, because he wasn't expecting Sollux to say anything else, wasn't really paying attention.

"Comply," he repeated. Dave shook his head, confused. "Will comply ."

Oh. "I know. We know," said Dave. He wished he knew what to say. "This isn't a test. Um. You can't fail."

Sollux took a few minutes to recover. Dave could see him silently shaping his mouth around words. Encouraged to see how hard Sollux was working at communicating, Dave waited patiently. "No co." He stopped, coughed, started again. "No correshun. Corretion? Correction?"

"No correction," Dave said fervently .

At times like this, he never knew whether to look at Karkat or not. He couldn’t tell whether it was better to acknowledge how fucked up everything was, or pretend it was all fine. He didn’t think Karkat would accept any sort of comfort, though, so he avoided his gaze.

They reached Mennara in good time, which Dave was thankful for. The sooner they could get Sollux somewhere he felt safe, the happier he'd be and the less stress they'd all be under. They were met at the terminal by a young, brown-blooded troll who was using a wheelchair similar to Sollux's . 

"Hi," he said. "My name, is Tavros. I'm supposed to show you, to your hive."

The city they were in was an odd place, a mix of troll and human and carapacian architecture. Dave couldn’t say what he was expecting, but given that this was the largest resistance stronghold in this particular galaxy, he was surprised it looked so normal. There were no obvious fortifications that he could see. There didn’t seem to be many soldiers around, either , unless they were all out of uniform and carrying concealed weapons. Dave supposed that wasn’t out of the question.

They took a public shuttle to the hive which had been prepared for them. Tavros had a pass for each of them. Dave didn’t really understand how it worked, and didn’t care.

They ended up outside a large sprawling building. Dave could recognise the work of trolls in the odd angles and seemingly random placement of walls. Karkat stared up at the highest floor, lip curling a fraction, clearly unimpressed. It was funny; aside from the strange construction of the building, it reminded Dave of the apartment complex he grew up in with his bro, until they had to flee. But he knew that trolls generally grew up living without other trolls nearby, and most of them only lived in communal spaces as adults if they had to.

"This way," Tavros said. "You're on the ground floor, same as me."

Karkat was pushing Sollux's wheelchair. Dave wondered if he should help Tavros with the door, but he seemed to have it under control, opening it and rolling through with clearly practiced movements. Dave held the door open for Karkat, who cast an unimpressed look down the corridor. The tiles on the floor were chipped and uneven, the walls were covered in peeling paint and grubby marks, and it reminded Dave of home.

"Which way?" Karkat asked, and Tavros led them off to the right. A couple of turns later he stopped outside a door. A troll was just locking a different door a bit further down, and Karkat stiffened.

"This is your key," said Tavros. Dave took it, since Karkat seemed to be busy trying to watch the troll leaving his hive without looking like he was watching him.

"Thanks," Dave said, opening the door.

They entered the apartment together, and as soon as the door was closed Karkat rounded on Tavros. "Who was that leaving just now?"

"Who, Gamzee?"

"I don't know, is that his name? What was he doing here?"

Tavros looked baffled, and Dave was feeling a little puzzled himself. "He lives here."

"Bullshit."

"Uh," said Tavros. "No, it's true?"

"There's no fucking way an indigo-blood lives in the same hiveblock as us, what are you playing at."

Tavros looked down, fidgeting with the armrest of his wheelchair. "I'm serious?" he said. "The hemospectrum carries no weight, here." 

Karkat scoffed, and Tavros wouldn’t look at him. Dave tried to diffuse the tension by distracting them .

"Does this place have proper beds, or just your weird troll cocoon things?" he asked.

"I think, they moved in a human sleeping platform for you," said Tavros. "I'll show you around. The layout is the same, as my apartment."

"You live in this building too?" Dave asked.

"Yes, I think, that's why they gave me this job." Tavros paused. "That, and also, there's not many things, I can do to contribute to the resistance, usually ."

He looked down at his wheelchair gloomily. Dave had never seen a troll with any kind of disability before he met Terezi, and now, Tavros. It had never occurred to him to question why that was, but it made sense that trollish attitudes towards disability would be as shitty as their attitudes towards everything else. No wonder Tavros and Terezi joined the resistance .

Tavros showed them to Sollux's room first. They moved him from the wheelchair to a sofa and propped him up with a few cushions. They then spent a few minutes trying to get him to understand that they'd be gone, but would be nearby and come back soon, an effort which left Karkat red-faced with frustration.

Dave was pretty sure that the problem was not that Sollux didn’t understand, but that he didn’t care. They weren’t asking him to do anything, after all. Karkat couldn’t seem to accept that, though.

Dave and Karkat's rooms were much smaller. Dave suspected they weren’t actually intended to be bedrooms at all, but had been hastily converted. His own room had a desk built into the wall, which heightened his suspicions.

The apartment was otherwise unremarkable. The 'nutrition block ' was also small, but Dave wasn’t worried by that; he didn’t cook, and he was pretty sure Karkat didn’t either. The 'ablution block' was spacious in comparison, which would make it easier when they inevitably had to assist Sollux in there. There was a communal 'laundering block' down the hall, so the rest of the apartment was made up of a combined living and dining area. Dave didn’t hear the trollish names for those rooms, and couldn’t care less. 

The tour only took a few minutes, after which Tavros excused himself, leaving behind his trollian handle in case they needed to contact him. Dave realised that he had no idea what was going to happen now. He and Karkat exchanged a glance, and then Karkat turned tail and made for Sollux's room. 

Dave sighed and opened the pantry. It probably had some ridiculous troll name Karkat would tell him about if he ever left Sollux’s side. It mostly contained troll food, and the human food it held was pretty uninspiring, but after months of living off barely inedible scraps it looked like a feast. Dave made himself a bologna sandwich and poured a glass of iced tea, and sat down to savour the meal.

The small dining table was pushed up against the wall of the kitchen. Sitting in the middle of it was a large envelope full of papers. Dave picked it up. His name wasn’t on it, and nor was Karkat's, but it did have a label which said, 'to the occupoisoners’ , so he figured it was meant for them.

The first page he pulled out said 'New recruit training schedule'. Now it made sense. A day or two before they’d left the space station, Terezi had said something about them needing training before the resistance would involve them in missions. Dave hadn't really paid attention at the time. Luckily they'd anticipated that, and provided the information in writing.

It looked as though he and Karkat were both supposed to begin tomorrow. These guys didn’t waste time. There was weapons training in the morning and procedural training in the afternoon. There was no information in there about who was supposed to take care of Sollux while they were doing that. He definitely wasn’t up to being left on his own. Karkat was not going to be impressed.

Karkat was not impressed. At first he reacted with a healthy dose of swearing, but he soon realised that his shouting was upsetting Sollux, and excused himself, muttering that he was going to get in touch with Terezi. 

And then it was just Dave and Sollux. "He's not angry with you," Dave said, because Sollux still looked a bit tense and hunched.

Sollux did what he always did whenever someone said something to him which didn’t require a response, which was nothing. Dave wondered how he was coping with the sudden change in environment. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," Sollux answered. Dave wasn’t reassured; he was convinced that in Sollux's head, 'okay' meant 'I'm not in imminent danger of vomiting, soiling myself, or dying'. It had taken a fair bit of work to achieve even that much progress.

Then, Sollux spoke up again. "Why?"

"Why what?" Dave asked. Sollux didn’t clarify, so Dave, determined to encourage every sign of autonomy he expressed, answered as best he could. "Why did we leave the space station and come here? Karkat and I have some... some things we need to do, and we need to be here for that."

He half expected Sollux to ask what things, and he was dreading it, both because he wasn’t too sure himself, and because he didn’t want to tell Sollux anything which might upset him. But instead, Sollux said, "Instructions?”

“Uh... I’m not following you.”

Sollux frowned and tried again. “Instructions? For... what to do?”

Dave stared at him. "Just... rest and get better. Practice walking and talking and all that fun stuff.” 

Sollux looked at him. Maybe Dave had this all wrong; maybe Sollux didn’t need to speak if he could say with no more than a look that he thought Dave was lying. It kind of stung, after he’d worked so hard on helping Sollux recover.

“Why? Is there something you want to be doing?”

Sollux didn’t answer. Dave supposed he shouldn’t have expected anything else. Karkat came back before Dave could try asking Sollux anything else.

"I talked to Terezi," Karkat said. "She's going to sort things out so that we have different training times. That way one of us can always stay with Sollux ."

"Cool," Dave said, even though all Karkat had really done was raise a bunch of new questions. What would happen after training? What if they were both needed on missions, or if they were given jobs with conflicting schedules? Maybe Sollux would be better by then, but it seemed unlikely, and Dave didn’t think the resistance would be content for one of them to be his full time carer, either.

But. That was a problem for later. Right now, they needed to get the apartment set up and to rest up for tomorrow.

***

Terezi arranged for Karkat to complete the morning weapons training sessions, and Dave the afternoon protocol lessons, with the expectation that they would switch off once the course was completed after four weeks. Dave got the impression the trolls didn’t really like them doing things this way. He understood why, when he turned up to the first session and the trainer kept referring to things the group had done that morning. 

Everyone else knew each other from the morning class, and Dave was the odd one out. He was the only human. There were three carapacians, and the rest were trolls from various points on the hemospectrum. Everyone on Mennara insisted that the hemospectrum didn’t mean anything to them, but Dave didn’t miss the way the warmbloods and coolbloods grouped together.

The material was as dull as shit. The instructor was a massive cobalt blood who looked as though he should be teaching some advanced combat training, possibly on how to rip someone's arms off with your bare hands. It didn’t help that he launched into a lecture on correct communicator protocols and promptly broke into a sweat which he dabbed away from his face with a towel .

"What's the deal with this guy?" Dave asked the carapacian sitting next to him. He – Dave thought it was a he, but it was often hard to tell with carapacians – turned to Dave and shrugged. Dave looked down at the notes the carapacian had been dutifully taking in neat capital letters.

"He looks really uncomfortable up there. Do you think he got assigned to teach this class as some kind of punishment?"

The carapacian shrugged again, and Dave heard the sound of a throat being cleared from the front of the room.

"I hope you're giving this your full attention," the instructor said, glaring squarely at Dave. 

"Absolutely," Dave said .

"Good. Because these are the procedures which let us identify resistance space vessels, so that we don't mistakenly fire on resistance pilots. Anyone who fails to treat this topic with the gravity it deserves will be reprimanded."

The instructor paused and grimaced. "I'm out of towels. Please excuse me. While I'm gone, complete the example on the board."

So. Training was tedious, although Dave amused himself by counting the number of times he could get Equius to change towels during one class , then trying to break his record. When he got home after his first day, he found that Karkat had located some paint and gone to work on Sollux's room. One of the closet doors was now painted red, the other blue. 

"What's this?" Dave asks.

Karkat shrugged. "They said we could decorate the place, so I thought... he likes red and blue. I used to make fun of him for it, but... I thought it might cheer him up."

Karkat had a tendency to talk about Sollux as though he wasn’t there. Dave was sure it was just the result of him being so different now. Karkat knew that Sollux was still the same person, but struggled to treat him that way. Still, Dave made a point of addressing Sollux now.

"Is that true? Did Karkat tease your awesome red and blue aesthetic?"

Karkat obviously didn’t expect any response, and Dave's expectations were pretty low as well, but after a minute Sollux said, "Weird. Binary."

Karkat let a surprised gasp escape, and Dave grinned. "I bet you didn’t just let him get away with that, though, did you?"

It took longer for Sollux to answer this time, but he was clearly working on it, so Dave and Karkat waited patiently. 

"Codes," he said, "like a thou. Thouthan... Thou _sand_ monkeys ."

Karkat let out a cry, and reached out like he wanted to grab Sollux but thought better of it. "You remember?"

"KK," Sollux said, and Karkat sank down next to his chair, hands over his face. "Test?"

"This isn't a test," Dave said, because Karkat didn’t seem to be up to answering. Sollux looked at him.

"Loyal," he said. "Praise her. Imperious. Condescension." 

"No," Dave said firmly. "Fuck the Condesce. She can go right to hell where she belongs."

Sollux looked surprised, and then scared. He looked around like he was expecting an imperial drone to swoop in with a culling fork, but as the minutes passed without that happening, his fear subsided.

"Fuck the. Condesce?" he whispered.

"Yeah, fuck the Condesce!" Dave responded loudly.

"Fuck. The Condesce," Sollux said more confidently. "KK?"

Karkat laughed and grabbed Sollux's hand. "Fuck the Condesce ."


	5. Chapter 5

So Sollux might finally believe that this was all real, and that Karkat was really his friend from back on Alternia, rather than an elaborate program designed to trick him . Dave wondered what that would be like, to not be able to trust your own mind, but thinking about it too hard made him nauseous, so he stopped. Sollux was safe with them now, that was the most important thing.

His friend the carapacian from procedures class was called Wistful Visionary. Carapacians sure had some weird naming customs. He was a pretty cool guy. He didn’t want to fight, but the training was mandatory for all new recruits. He spent a good amount of their class time briefing Dave on the virtues of democracy and the many advantages it had over monarchy, and the reason he left his home to join the resistance.

He was pretty good at procedures, and would occasionally lend Dave his notes even though he disapproved of Dave copying them and would quiz him on the material the next day without fail. He was struggling with the weapons training and Dave wasn’t entirely sure why; it all seemed to be tangled up in some past trauma he wasn’t really willing to share. Karkat helped him, apparently, because he was keeping his distance from the other trolls and always ended up paired with one of the carapacians as a result, but even Karkat said that the real problem was WV didn’t want to fight, and he couldn’t fix that .

Sollux had improved a lot since the day Karkat painted his closet doors. He could feed himself now, although he was clumsy, and he could even stand up so long as Dave or Karkat helped him balance and supported some of his weight. 

Sollux’s psionics were as powerful as Karkat had said. He could lift himself into the air or push his own wheelchair around, but didn’t have the fine control for things like dressing himself. Dave suspected if he’d been able to accomplish such tasks with his psionics it would have been difficult to convince him to use more mundane methods. On days when Sollux got frustrated he would throw things around, resulting in three broken windows and a long gouge in the door. It was alarming even if Sollux directed his destructiveness at himself rather than anyone else. According to Karkat, he’d always been prone to such moods and it was only the severity which had changed.

On a more positive note, Sollux was a lot more talkative. After watching Karkat go through his exercise regime day after day, Dave had thought to take the same approach to speaking. The doctors had all been certain that Sollux would talk if he felt like talking, but it had seemed so obvious to Dave that his reluctance was simply due to how much effort it took him to utter even the simplest sentence.

He still couldn’t get all the way through 'the pretty pink pony prances towards the stoned college dropout ' without stopping to rest, but he spoke much more readily now, and his sentences were growing longer and more fluid. He still tended to speak in phrases which didn’t quite fit what he was trying to say. If Dave asked him what he wanted for dinner, Sollux might say, 'Yes, that sounds good,' but at least he didn’t stare blankly or mention 'acceptable parameters,' and Dave was satisfied with that for now.

He tended to take Sollux outside in the mornings. He wasn’t really an outdoors sort of guy, and from what Karkat had said Sollux was even less so, but Dave still couldn’t shake the feeling that it might be therapeutic. 

Mennara had some beautiful plant life, a hundred different types of incredibly fragrant flowers and trees filled with brightly coloured leaves. It was much colder that Dave was comfortable with. Sometimes it snowed overnight, but never enough to linger once the sun came up. There was always at least a slight breeze. Dave dressed himself and Sollux in warm clothes and didn’t complain.

If they walked a little distance to the south, they reached an area which was less built up. Dave liked it because he and Sollux could practice speaking and walking without an audience of gawking trolls. 

If they headed west from their apartment, that brought them closer to the city centre where there was more to see. There was a park there, full of trees with blue and purple blossoms. Sometimes they fell so thick on the ground that it looked like a lake. There was a library they visited sometimes , so that Dave could borrow the most strange and terrible troll movies he could find and watch them in the living room to see how loudly Karkat would rant. He always grabbed a romance novel or two as well, so that he could bribe his way back into Karkat’s good graces afterwards.

Next to the library was a stately building which Dave thought was some kind of city hall. He never paid it that much attention, to be honest, until one day something caught his eye.

His blond hair stood out here. All trolls had black hair, and as far as he could tell carapacians had no hair at all. The other humans he saw with fair hair certainly drew plenty of stares, but Dave thought he, with hair so pale it was almost white, attracted more attention than anyone else.

So when he saw a human one day climbing the steps of the city hall, with hair the same shade as his own, his heart almost stopped right then and there. 

"Hey!" he shouted, waving his hand, but the woman -it must be a woman, he was as sure as he could be, looking at the back of her head from over a hundred yards away. Most of her was obscured by a huge fur-lined coat. She didn’t hear him .

Dave started towards her, but only went a few steps before he turned back. He couldn’t leave Sollux out here by himself. He grabbed Sollux's wheelchair and pushed it as fast as he could. She disappeared into the building well before he reached the steps. Dave stopped at the bottom and wondered how to get Sollux up there. Trolls weren’t really into accessibility.

"Wrong?" Sollux asked, his expression concerned.

"I think I saw someone I know," Dave explained.

"Tavros?" Sollux guessed, because he was the one person apart from Karkat and Dave whose name Sollux seemed to know.

"Not Tavros." Dave looked up at the doorway again, then forced out a laugh. "Yeah, I'm probably just imagining things. The odds would have to be astronomical. More than astronomical."

He took Sollux home, but he wasn’t the coolkid he used to be, and gave in to the urge to look over his shoulder.

***

Gamzee was simultaneously the most hilarious and most irritating person Dave had ever met, and Dave had shared a bedroom with John for six years. He was perpetually in a state of extreme chill which Dave thought was at least 80% chemically induced. His speech was barely intelligible thanks to a complete disregard for the rules of grammar, which Dave could respect except that Gamzee seemed to be completely sincere about it .

Karkat seemed to have gotten over his distrust, probably because it was hard to talk to Gamzee for any length of time and believe him capable of hurting anyone . He'd taken to hanging out in their apartment and was always very kind to Sollux, which Dave appreciated.

So it wasn’t unusual for Dave to come back from procedures class and find Gamzee sitting at the kitchen table while Karkat made dinner .

"Hey, Dave, my brother," he said. "It's all up and good to see you."

"Hi, Gamzee," Dave said. "Karkat, Sollux. Having fun?"

Sollux, sitting in a chair opposite Gamzee, just gave Dave a blank look. Fun was one of the concepts he didn’t seem able to grasp, but Dave meant to persevere. Karkat, meanwhile, looked at Dave and scoffed.

"Fun? Of course. With company like this, how could I avoid it?"

He complained incessantly about Gamzee hanging around, but he didn’t actually do anything to dissuade him. He'd gripe for hours about Gamzee's apparent inability to feed himself anything which was not a sopor pie, but Dave was sure he was going to invite Gamzee to share the dinner he was currently making. 

"What did you guys do today?"

"We..." Karkat began, then cut himself off. "Sollux, tell Dave about your day."

Sollux blinked a few times, then said, "Woke up at half past seven. Breakfast was-"

"No, not that, Dave was here for that!" Karkat interrupted. "What did you do after Dave went to class?"

Sollux frowned, probably going over every minute of the day to identify the part Karkat was referring to. Dave followed Karkat's lead, though, and didn’t help him. 

"Walked," Sollux said at last, and Dave's jaw dropped. 

"Wow!" he said, and then, before he could get too excited, reminded himself there was something else he'd been getting Sollux to work on. "Who walked?"

Sollux paused, but not as long this time. He knew what Dave was getting at.

"Sollux," he said, and then, "I. I walked."

Dave grinned, the kind of broad, unguarded expression his bro would have mocked him for. "That's awesome."

"It's a motherfucking miracle, what my Sollux bro has all up and motherfucking done."

"You want a motherfucking miracle, see if you can eat this without sticking it up your nose like a wiggler," Karkat said, dropping a plate in front of him.

He gave Dave a plate too. More often than not, when Karkat cooked he tried to make something Dave could eat, and the amount of griping he did about it was minimal. Dave sat between Sollux and Gamzee and dug in.

Gamzee stared at him, but that wasn’t so out of character for him. Dave ignored it until Gamzee said, "Do all humans have the same motherfucking miracle hair that you do?"

"Of course not. I know you've seen other humans, Gamzee, how many of them looked like me?"

"I saw one today," Gamzee said dreamily. "I thought it was you at first, but then I saw her face. She had white hair. Miracle motherfucking hair."

Dave dismissed Gamzee's words reflexively, because a lot of what Gamzee said was incomprehensible and out of touch with reality, but then the meaning sank in and he dropped his fork.

"You what? Who was it?" he asked.

"I don't know, motherfucker, I didn't get all close enough to be up and speaking to her."

"Where were you?"

Karkat was watching him warily, eating utensil dangling loosely from his hand. Even Sollux had noticed something odd about Dave's behaviour. Gamzee, on the other hand, seemed totally unaware. 

"It was when I up and walked myself all down to the motherfucking store for a pie. Just a normal pie," he added quickly, in response to Karkat's disgruntled look. "It had berries in it."

"Where did she go? Do you think she'll be there again?"

Gamzee blinked at him, finally seeming to register that something was up. "Do you know this motherfucker?"

"How can I know that if I haven't seen her myself? Gamzee, please just tell me where to find her."

"I'm sorry, my bro, I don't know where she went."

Dave sagged, the disappointment overwhelming him. It was stupid, anyway, he couldn’t assume that this woman was someone specific based only on her hair. She could have been anyone, and it was a big city, so it was better if he just tried to forget about it because there was a vanishingly small chance of him ever running into her.

“We can ask around,” Karkat offered. “If her hair is like yours, she’ll stand out, so it shouldn’t be hard to track her down.”

“Yeah, sure,” Dave said, trying to sound like he really thought that was a possibility. “Thanks, Karkat.”

He wasn’t Gamzee, and he hadn’t believed in miracles in a long time .

***

The next day was his last day of procedures class. They were supposed to be revising for the assessment they would sit tomorrow, but Dave couldn’t concentrate worth a damn. Throughout the night he’d had dreams about the woman he’d seen, dreams where he was a bit faster, or she heard his shout, and in some of them she turned around and she was a stranger, but in others she recognised Dave but she didn’t want to see him. Dave had woken with a start after every dream, and tossed and turned for ages until he drifted off again, and now he was exhausted . 

He was probably no better off than if he'd skipped. Equius had some rather unflattering comments about Dave's effort on the revision questions. Dave responded, untruthfully, that his poor performance was deliberate, and a way of questioning the imposed hierarchies the resistance was working to dismantle. Equius excused himself and returned with an entire stack of towels. Score .

It was a relief to get out of the classroom, and Dave wasted no time in making his way home. He was looking forward to something to eat and an early night, but he entered the apartment to find Karkat, Sollux and Gamzee in the living room, dressed up like they were about to go somewhere.

“What’s going on?”

“Oh, finally, you’re back.” Karkat pointed over his shoulder to Gamzee. “This genius woke up this afternoon and realised that the girl he saw yesterday wasn’t alone. She was with a troll, someone he knows.”

“Huh?” said Dave stupidly.

Karkat rolled his eyes. “Do you want to come with us to Kanaya’s hive and see if she knows where to find your friend?”

“Okay,” said Dave. Karkat eyeballed him.

“Okay?” Karkat repeated. “I mean, there’s no rush. You could have a shower first, change your clothes, we could have something to eat ...”

“Fuck no, let’s go now,” said Dave. Karkat rolled his eyes and Dave kind of wanted to shove him. If they didn’t go now he was going to lose his nerve. If he let himself get excited, he’d end up disappointed. What did Karkat even want him to say?

They left the apartment, Karkat first, pushing Sollux’s chair, then Dave, with Gamzee trailing behind. Karkat stopped just outside the door to the building and looked at Gamzee, who spent a few seconds looking around before he appeared to realise they were waiting for him to show them the way. Gamzee turned left and said, "This way, motherfuckers."

Gamzee's favoured gait was slow and meandering. By the time they reached the apartment block where Kanaya apparently lived, Dave felt like he was about to explode. 

It was much nicer than their own apartment building. There was a lobby with actual furniture in it, and it was quiet. If any of the inhabitants were playing computer games with the sound turned up, or arguing, or having sex, they couldn’t hear it.

There was an elevator , which was fortunate because Kanaya apparently lived on the seventh floor. Dave tried to make the elevator go faster with his mind, without success. So far as he knew, anyway. Maybe the elevator would have been even slower without his mind powers? Dave put that thought aside to contemplate later.

Then Gamzee was finally knocking at a door which looked like all the other doors, and a troll was opening it, and Dave was barely hearing Gamzee introduce him, although Kanaya did seem perfectly nice. She invited them in, and Dave, because he was stupid, suddenly got cold feet and didn’t move until Karkat gave him a shove between his shoulder blades.

He stumbled through the door and his eyes immediately went to the couch behind Kanaya where someone was sitting, and it was Rose, it really was her, and she was looking at him and it was like they were never apart at all, she'd barely changed, she looked _fine_.

Then Rose stood up and turned away, walked to a door at the back of the room and passed through it, closing it behind her.

***

"Oh, dear," Kanaya said, a slightly disconcerted expression filling her previously impassive face. "I’m sorry. Rose isn’t very comfortable with large groups of people."

Dave was pretty sure everyone was looking at him. They were looking at him and waiting for him to say something, because Rose was his friend and he should know what to do. He should know what she needed. He shouldn't be someone she ran from.

"Is she alright?" Karkat asked when Dave doesn't speak.

"I... I should go and check on her," Kanaya said. She crossed the room to the doorway where Rose had vanished and disappeared from view, gone to look after Rose because Dave couldn’t do it. Because he was the one she’d run from .

With Kanaya gone, Dave half-turned towards Karkat and mumbled, "We should go home."

"What?" Karkat said. "No! We should wait."

"You saw how she reacted when she saw me, man, she doesn't want me here."

"Dave. You incomprehensible failure to be intelligent enough to be a buffoon . She was shocked, she probably just needs a minute to get herself together. How would you react if you'd been in her shoes?"

"I don't think I would have run screaming in the opposite direction."

"Well, if you say so. But if you had, and you finally pulled your head out of your ass and came back out to find that she'd gone, what would you think then?"

God damn it, he was right. "I fucking hate you," Dave said.

After perhaps fifteen minutes, the door opened a crack, and Kanaya shuffled out, awkwardly keeping her arm around Rose who was trying to stand behind her.

"Dave," Rose said. "My apologies."

She sounded just like her old self. Calm, collected, self-possessed. It didn’t match her body language at all.

"This seems like a good night to buy dinner," Kanaya said. "Why don't you three come with me to pick it up?"

She meant Karkat, Sollux, and Gamzee, Dave realised. They were going to step out and give him and Rose a chance to talk privately. 

What the hell was he going to say to her?

The trolls all stepped out of the apartment, and Dave was left to stare at Rose while the most awkward silence in history filled the room.

"Would you like a drink?" Rose offered, sounding only slightly robotic.

"Sure," Dave agreed at once. That would give him something to do with his hands, and his mouth, besides just stand around like a statue.

"What would you like? There's juice. Not apple, I'm afraid, but jamlor. Or there's coffee. Or firemelon wine."

Dave missed apple juice so much it hurt, and the brownish-red golf ball sized jamlor berries which grew on Mennara were no substitute. "Just water is fine."

"If you're certain."

Rose got him a glass of water and poured a glass of wine for herself, which made Dave frown slightly. Rose used to scoff at her own mother's excessive drinking and refused to touch alcohol herself in response. She really had changed, whether she looked the same or not.

Despite Dave's hopes, it was not any less awkward once they both had a drink in their hands. They both sipped a few times, and when Dave had a mouthful of water Rose startled him by asking, "Do you know what happened to John?"

Because Dave was just that cool, he didn’t spit the water everywhere and managed to swallow it with minimal spluttering. Now he understood why Rose ran away. She was always smarter than him, quicker on the uptake, she would have realised that seeing each other would mean thinking about all that again.

"No," he said levelly. "He was the last one to be assigned. About a week after you... went... I was assigned to a physical labour unit in Inolia. That's the last time I saw him."

They were both quiet for a minute. There was nothing to say to that. John was still out there somewhere, and they didn’t know where. He might be okay, or he might not. He might still be a slave, or he might have escaped against the odds, the same way Rose and Dave had. He might be alive, or...

"How did you end up here?" Dave asked, because that had to be better than any other topic they could discuss right now. He'd guessed correctly, because Rose actually gave a faint smile at the question. 

"It was Kanaya," she said. "She was on an undercover mission. She doesn't normally do those, because she's a jade-blood. They're not very common, so they're a bit too recognisable, but.... The resistance got the opportunity, when they learned that a jade-blood was to attend a ceremony on Janibor, to send Kanaya in their place. I was assigned to wait on her while she was there, and when Kanaya left she brought me with her ."

There was a faraway look in Rose's eyes, suggesting that there was a lot more to this story than she was saying, but Dave certainly didn’t want to go into detail about all the shit he'd done since the three of them were taken by Alternian raiders, so he couldn’t blame Rose for skimming over the topic.

"How did you come to be here?" Rose asked, and Dave explained how he met Karkat and how they’d saved Sollux together.

"He was actually installed as the ship's helmsman? And you got him out?" Rose asked, eyes wide.

"I guess so," Dave said uncomfortably. He always felt weird about the awed reactions people gave when they heard that story. It was only dumb luck that had kept them all from being killed. 

"That’s incredible," Rose murmured. “The resistance must be thrilled to have you on board.” Her mouth twisted.

“What’s wrong?” Dave asked

Rose bit her lip, a mannerism Dave remembered from before, something she did when she realised she'd accidentally been a bit too sincere. "I don't think the resistance leaders like the idea of me - of anyone - just sitting around and not pulling their weight. Kanaya's stuck her neck out for me. They want me to go through the training program, but I don't... I don't think I..."

Dave remembered Rose's reaction when he came through the door. He felt a surge of protectiveness towards her.

"Hey," he said. "Fuck them, you know? If you're not ready, you're not ready. They'll just have to wait."

Rose nodded, the tension in her expression easing. "Yes, well. Thank you, Dave."

A rattle at the door then announced the return of Kanaya and the others, and Dave caught the mouth-watering scent of delicious human food. There were places here where humans cooked human food, but the ingredients were expensive and usually out of Dave's budget. Whatever Kanaya did for the resistance, she must be well paid.

***

Everyone else who completed the procedures class with Dave had at least five days of breathing space while they waited for their results and to learn what kind of work they would be doing for the resistance. For Dave and Karkat, however, two days after their final assessment they were back in class, Dave with weapons training in the morning and Karkat with procedures in the afternoon.

Dave actually kind of enjoyed it. He had a bit of a head start over the others, knowing all the procedures already, and all the training he did with his bro back on earth proved to be useful. The instructor was an olive blood who looked like she’d be more at home playing with stuffed animals than beating up stuffed training dummies, but Dave learned how misleading that impression was the first time she reduced a heavy bag to shreds with her claws. Nepeta might seem pretty goofy, but she knew how to fight. 

All the students seemed to be somewhat proficient in at least one weapon, so it was just as well Bro had been such a hardass back when he was a kid. They all got training in firearms and some hand-to-hand training, but everyone who had experience with any specific weapon (which was just about everyone), was permitted to focus on that. Dave no longer had his sword, but one was provided to him. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done . 

Every day without fail, Karkat returned from procedures class with a litany of complaints, about the stupid, pointless rules, about the other students, about Equius. It gave Dave endless amusement. He and Sollux tended to spend most afternoons with Rose now, but Dave tried to be back in the hive getting dinner ready by the time Karkat got home . It was what Karkat had done for him when their schedules had been reversed.

Rose wasn’t well. That had been obvious when Dave first saw her, but it only became more apparent as Dave spent more time with her. At first it amused him to see how many times he could say shit like, ‘It’s been way too long since I saw your hot mom,’ or ‘So I had this dream about a mushroom the other day,’ and watch Rose offer a vague reply, or no response at all. After a while though, it was just sad. Like trying to remember the rules for an old game when half the pieces were missing. 

It wasn’t just that Rose was quieter and slower to respond with biting sarcasm. She’d stopped taking interest in things. Maybe her pursuits had always been too weird and obscure for Dave to understand before, but Rose had always been working on something, learning about something. Now here they were on an alien goddamn planet, and Rose couldn’t have cared less. She didn’t like leaving the apartment, so they stayed inside watching broadcasts or listening to music. Rose couldn’t be persuaded to do anything more interactive than that.

When Dave brought it up, Rose insisted she was just tired, but he knew there was more to it than that. The longer it went on, the harder it was to ignore. Dave didn’t know whether it was better to pretend everything was fine or ask her about it.

"I don't think she'd talk to me about it even if I did ask her," he confided to Kanaya one day. "We never really had a touchy-feely friendship like that."

If anything, he thought Rose was more likely to talk to Sollux about it. More than once, he’d heard her reduce Sollux to fits of laughter by telling an incredibly disturbing joke with an utterly deadpan expression on her face. Once, Dave would have been laughing right alongside Sollux, but now he tended to make himself scarce. He got the unpleasant feeling sometimes that maybe Rose felt like she _couldn’t_ talk to him. But that was silly, and he wasn’t about to bother Kanaya with his baseless insecurities.

Kanaya nodded. She was easy to talk to, partly because she didn't know Dave back when his ironic facade was the biggest part of his persona, and partly because she could make him feel like there was nothing she'd rather be doing than listening to him. 

"But if I don't, I almost feel like I'm abandoning her. Uh. I don’t know if that makes sense."

"It does," Kanaya said. "It may not be a terrible idea to broach the subject. Rose is quite aware that she's not hiding her difficulties as well as she'd like. I think it may come as a relief to have the issue out in the open, even if you were only to say that you were available if she did want to talk."

"I'll do that," Dave said, even though he still doubted it would do much good. "Does she at least talk to you about it?"

"Do you talk to Karkat about it?" she countered. Dave could feel himself bristle.

"That's not the same," he insisted. "I was part of a manual labour unit, not a personal servant. I'm pretty sure none of the trolls overseeing us ever noticed me as an individual. I was able to just fly under the radar. I was fine."

Kanaya nodded at him but didn’t speak, so Dave continued to fill up that hungry silence.

"I always thought I'd keep fighting back until the very end, you know. It turns out it didn't take as much for me to give in as I thought. They just had to beat me down enough, threaten me enough, and I was happy to do my work just to be ignored. What-" His voice broke. "I think Rose and John thought of me as the tough one, but they were wrong. And my bro, he wanted me to be... but I couldn't do it. What would he think, if he knew?"

Dave wrapped a hand across his mouth and a silence fell in the room which felt sharp and cold.

"Don't you think he'd be glad you survived?" Kanaya asked.

Dave didn’t answer. He didn’t know.


	6. Chapter 6

Making the decision to talk to Rose was one thing, but figuring out how to bring it up was quite another. It was another typical day. Dave and Sollux had crossed town to Kanaya's apartment. Sollux was playing with some puzzle which was supposed to improve his hands' strength and dexterity, but it was clearly not going to keep him busy for long. Sollux was smart enough that Dave was sure he figured out the solution long before he convinced his fingers to make the necessary movements to execute it. They’d have to find something else to occupy him soon. Sollux wasn’t one to persist at a frustrating task if it didn’t pose a mental challenge.

Rose was sipping at a glass of wine as though she thought that by only taking small sips, she could hide the fact that she'd downed half a bottle since Dave arrived. Her drinking was something else that concerned him, and which he didn’t know what to do about.

Still. What harm could talking do? Dave asked himself that and wilfully ignored the gut feeling he had which said talking could hurt plenty. Surely anything was better than this status quo.

"You're drinking a lot," he said, trying to keep his voice free of judgement. 

"This is true," Rose answered coolly. "Any other observations you wish to share?"

Jeez. "I'm not trying to criticize or anything. It just worries me a bit." Dave winced at expressing such a sincere sentiment and waited for Rose to unleash the full force of her sarcasm, but it didn’t come. "In the past you always insisted you'd never repeat your mom's mistakes."

"Yes, well, in the past I was an idiot," Rose retorted, her voice so full of venom that Dave flinched. Even Sollux looked up, his red and blue eyes wide. "What I do or don't choose to do seems to have no effect on anything, so I don't see the point in basing my actions on meaningless moral posturing and point-scoring."

"Wow," said Dave. "That's the least Rose-like thing you've ever said."

"Well, I defer to your expertise in such matters," Rose snarked.

Dave didn’t rise to the bait. "I had big ideas when we were first taken," he said. "I thought we'd break free and kick ass like we were a three-part synchronised ass kicking machine which had lain idle in the corner for months, dreaming of the day when an ass showed up needing some kicking and it finally had the opportunity to prove its worth-"

"I remember," Rose said just as he was building momentum. "Because I was there."

"Yeah, well," Dave said, deflating a bit, "the point is I thought we'd be able to go home and be heroes. Even after we were split up, I thought... I thought it would work out. I'd be able to get away and turn the tables on those assholes and res... and rescue you and John." His voice dropped. He'd never admitted to anyone else the daydreams he used to have of saving them both. "But when we got to the plant, me and the other newbies, the first thing they did was line us all up, and they, they beat the shit out of us." Dave's fists clenched as he remembered. "Not because we'd done anything, just because they wanted us to know what we should expect the first time we didn't do exactly what we were told when we were told to do it. And it worked, because then I was too scared to even think about causing trouble. I never thought anything could break me that easily, you know ?"

Suddenly, Dave remembered that he wasn’t alone. He had an audience, and Rose and Sollux were both watching him. He remembered that he was supposed to be helping Rose cope with her own trauma, not blabber on about his.

Rose, perhaps sensing him begin to withdraw, put a hand on his arm and said, "I suppose neither of us is quite the person we thought we were."

Shit. Time for some damage control. “I mean, obviously that’s all in the past and now I’m fine. I just wanted you to know that even I have sometimes, in the past, not been okay.”

“Certainly,” said Rose, her tone flat. Dave winced.

“Status?” Sollux asked, and while his facial expressions were still less expressive than most people’s, there was the quirk to his eyebrows that meant he was being a little sarcastic.

“Within acceptable parameters,” Dave fired back, because two could play at that game.

But Sollux was one move ahead of him, because he turned to Rose and said, “That means not okay.”

That little fucker. Dave flipped him off. Sollux stuck his tongue out.

 

Rose nodded. She looked down at her half-full wine glass and said, "Yes. I am not okay either." Then she drained the rest of it in one gulp, but Dave would take what he could get.

"I'm not okay," Sollux said, taking Dave by surprise. When he talked about himself, it was usually only in concrete terms. Getting him to talk about his feelings or even his thoughts could be like pulling teeth.

"You're getting better, though," Dave insisted. "I heard you tell a joke yesterday."

"Yes," Sollux said. "Karkat has two moods: angry and pissed off." Then he smiled. It looked a little bit robotic, but he did it without being prompted.

They all fell quiet. Sollux’s smile faded, replaced with a thoughtful look. “Too many to be pale,” he said.

“Huh?” Dave said, but Rose caught on more quickly. She usually did.

“I suppose we could pass for some weird three-way moirallegiance right now. Does that make you uncomfortable?”

Sollux shrugged.

“Wait, that’s one of the quadrants, isn’t it? That’s a romance thing, right?”

“Yes, Dave,” said Rose with exaggerated patience.

“Oh, man, no. Rose is practically my sister,” Dave explained to Sollux. “There’s no sexing going on there.”

“Dave, that’s not... how have you been here so long and still understand nothing about troll romance?” Rose demanded.

Dave pulled his knees up in front of him, the better to hide his face . He didn’t want to admit to Rose that he knew perfectly well how troll romance worked, it was just that Sollux had taken him by surprise. Troll romance was one thing when he thought about it in the abstract but quite another if someone was applying those terms to him. He’d never considered the possibility that a troll might fill one of their quadrants with a human, but Sollux had said... but maybe that was just Sollux being a bit weird. 

Speaking of Sollux, he was angled away from Dave now and frowning going by the little Dave could see of his face. Shit, Dave hoped he hadn’t accidentally spurned an awkward trollish overture. That would be a shitty thing to do without noticing.

“Are you okay, man?” Dave asked.

“Better,” Sollux answered. “Like you said. What about you?”

That had Dave stumped. "I don't know. What do you think?"

"You laugh more," Sollux said, and it didn’t sound like much to Dave until he added, "You laughed at something Nepeta said earlier."

Dave had begun to spend a little bit of time with Nepeta outside of weapons training after getting to know her a little more, including the fact that she was, somehow, Equius’s moirail. She was a bit odd, but very cool, and Dave hadn't realised that he'd begun to trust her enough to laugh at her jokes rather than just laughing at her.

"Good point," Dave allowed, and then they both looked at Rose. 

"Is this what were measuring?" Rose asked. "Laughter as a measure of psychological well-being?"

"I'm sure it's not up to your rigorous standards, Doctor Freud, so feel free to propose your own method," said Dave generously.

Rose was quiet for a long time, and the atmosphere in the room became more serious. "I woke up twice last night," she said. "First after a couple of hours, but then... I went back to sleep. I normally can't, I'll just stay awake, but not... I was tired, but I think the nightmares weren't as bad either, so."

It was such a small thing. Dave felt his heart twist in his chest. It hurt more knowing that there was really nothing he could do.

"What do you do, if you can't sleep?" he asked.

"I’ll read, or knit, or watch a movie. Whatever’s quiet."

"Does Kanaya sit up with you?"

"Maybe, if she's awake and she knows I'm awake."

"But don't you wake her up?"

Rose looked appalled at the suggestion. "No, Dave. Of course not." She looked down. "I don't think she knows how bad it is. I don't really want her to know ."

Dave had a lot of things he'd like to say to that, starting with pointing out that Rose's drinking had probably already tipped Kanaya off that things were pretty bad, but Rose was talking so freely and he didn’t want to mess that up.

“So... what next?” he said instead. “Are we supposed to help each other figure out what to do to keep getting better? Is that what you do with your... diamond... thing?” He added that last bit mostly to see how Sollux would react. He turned and his eyes landed on Dave’s face. Dave smiled awkwardly and said, “Well, bro, let’s hear it.”

“You should have dinner,” Sollux said. “Your friend keeps inviting you. Go.”

The friend Sollux was referring to was WV. He’d been asking Dave almost as long as they’d been taking procedures together, and there was added urgency to the invitation now that he might be relocated any day. 

“I guess I should do that,” Dave admitted. “I know it would make him happy. I’ve been really slack about getting back to him.” He didn’t mention the other stuff, the way going anywhere unfamiliar left his heart pounding and made him jump at any noise. WV was his friend and wouldn’t hurt him. WV wouldn't hurt anyone . “What about you?” 

He was about to suggest that Sollux do a little socialising of his own, but Sollux spoke up first. "I'm going to get KK to let me use his computer."

"Really?" Dave asked. He knew from Karkat that Sollux had once loved computer games and was brilliant at coding, but he'd regarded computers with suspicion bordering on outright fear since he was rescued. Dave had assumed that they just reminded him too much of being a helmsman with no ability to do anything other than receive and follow commands.

"Yes," Sollux said.

"Cool," said Dave. If it turned out to be more than Sollux could handle, at least they'd have learned something. "Rose?"

She sighed and topped up her wine glass with the remainder of the bottle. "The appropriate step would seem to be making an awkward but heartfelt confession of my feelings to Kanaya ."

"What?" Dave said, floored, and then, because the ways of dickishness were not easily unlearned, he added, "Are you admitting to having feelings?"

Rose smiled faintly. "Only insofar as I don't want to be left out of this interspecies feelings jam."

"But seriously," said Dave, "that's a big step. Sollux and I are just talking baby steps, and you're planning to leap into full on sloppy human-on-troll makeouts?"

"Like I said, it only seems logical. I like Kanaya. I've been afraid of making any kind of move because of foolish irrational worries. No point dilly-dallying if I want to turn things around."

"Well," said Dave, "if you're sure." He wasn’t at all certain that this wouldn’t all end in tears, but it was Rose’s decision to make.

***

WV was so excited that Dave had agreed to come to his apartment for dinner for a change, he did a spontaneous dance in the middle of the street. Once, Dave would have looked down on such a blatant show of enthusiasm, but it was different with WV. He didn’t care in the slightest about being cool, and, as everyone knows, that is the true secret to being cool.

WV lived with his two carapacian friends from procedures class, Peaceful Messenger and Antagonistic Recluse. Dave didn’t know them that well, but PM always seemed friendly enough.

Carapacian food was really no different to human food. A little bland for Dave's tastes, with a heavy emphasis on leafy greens, but it could be worse. He wasn’t going to complain.

After the meal, WV showed him a letter he'd received. Dave wasn’t great at reading Alternian runes, but he got through it eventually.

WV had been given an assignment. He'd be managing food stores for the resistance, assisting with inventory and organisation. Dave would not be thrilled with such a job, but WV seemed pretty excited.

PM and AR had received their assignments too. PM would be distributing mail, while AR was the only one of the three to be given a combat role. They all insisted that they were very happy with this outcome.

Dave was glad that they were happy, but the development was an unwelcome reminder that changes loomed in his future as well. He'd finish his training soon, and then be given some job for the resistance. Either drudgery or terror awaited him, and neither was appealing.

He didn’t know if they'd want him to fight. He didn’t know if _he_ wanted to. He should want to, he thought. He _wanted_ to want to.

WV gave Dave a concerned look and put a comforting hand on his arm.

"Thanks for believing in me," Dave said. "You're a good friend."

He hugged WV goodbye and headed home to where Karkat and Sollux were doing something with Karkat's computer. It involved Karkat jabbing furiously at the keyboard and Sollux making pained expressions and occasional derisive comments. He had yet to touch the computer himself, but he seemed quite comfortable watching Karkat use it. Well, aside from his many complaints about Karkat's incompetence. Maybe eventually he'd give in to the urge to take over and show Karkat how it was done.

They were watching news transmissions , which were mostly Empire propaganda which the Resistance had hijacked and redistributed with their own commentary. The battle against the empire was currently concentrated on a moon in a galaxy not too far away , in astronomical terms. It was apparently rich in ores which were heavily used in making Alternian weaponry, so seizing it would represent a significant advantage. The empire would not relinquish it easily. In fact, news of a resistance defeat there had just reached Mennara. 

"Half of that last training group is being shipped there as reinforcements," Karkat said. 

So that was where AR was probably going. "Cool," said Dave dully. At least AR would enjoy himself.

"She says that if we can take the moon, we can try to liberate the empire colony on Pitchlark."

"She?"

"You know. Her. Feferi."

"Right."

Feferi was, as far as Dave could understand it, the heiress to Alternia's ruler, the Condesce. But she supported the resistance and was basically treated as the leader, even though Dave was pretty sure the actual strategic decisions were made by others.

"It's not just that there's mines on the moon itself," Karkat went on. "Most of the planets in that solar system are rich in resources, but the moon is the only body which is inhabitable long-term. The empire is desperate to hang onto it. If we could capture it, it would be a huge blow for them."

"Let's hope that works out then," Dave said, and that was the last time he thought about it for awhile.

***

Dave thought one of the great things about having psionic powers was probably never having to climb up on a chair to get something down from a high shelf. Sollux could walk without help now and only needed the wheelchair for long trips, but climbing up to get the sandwich press would have been beyond him without his telekinesis. Sollux presented the appliance to Dave and it immediately occurred to him to wonder if he was being an enormously insensitive doucheface . 

“I’m sorry, was that insensitive? I shouldn’t have asked you to do that. I’m such a tool.”

Dave couldn’t pretend he’d normally be worried about how much of a tool he might appear to be, but his friends were all so great about doing stuff like not sneaking up behind him or touching him when he wasn’t expecting it or standing over him when he was sitting down. He should at least try to be equally considerate.

“It’s fine,” said Sollux with a sigh, dropping the sandwich press on the counter. “It doesn’t bother me to use my psionics, or even if you ask me to use them.” He tilted his head. “I think the difference... or what makes being a helmsman so awful... I could barely remember what it was like to be a person, not a ship. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure that I’d ever _not_ been a ship. I forgot that food was even a thing. It’s different now that...”

But Dave never got to hear what, exactly, was different, because at that moment Karkat entered the kitchen and Sollux fell silent.

“What’s up?” Karkat asked, a bit awkwardly. It had to be obvious that Sollux had stopped speaking because of him.

“Lunch,” Sollux said shortly. “Make mine with extra grubsauce.” He walked out of the kitchen, leaving Dave alone with Karkat . 

“What do you want on yours?” Dave asked, hoping to distract Karkat but to no avail.

“I don’t get why he...” Karkat paused, shaking his head. “What I mean is, I’m glad he talks to you. I’m glad he has someone he feels able to talk to.”

“But?”

“But nothing. Only a complete fuckface would feel envious that they weren’t the one selected for sharing confidences about literally enduring a fate worse than death. Of course, that means that the logical conclusion is that a complete fuckface is exactly what I am, so that mystery is solved. Fucking hooray! And since it is now established that I am a complete fuckface, it’s probably safe to ignore anything I have to say. I really need to just shut the fuck up, but somehow I can’t stop myself ...”

“Karkat,” Dave interrupted, because he knew by now that Karkat had enough lung capacity to rant for literally hours without drawing a breath, “it’s fine. I get it. Haven’t you noticed Rose and me are the same way? I know she tells Sollux stuff she keeps from me. And I hate it, but... I think it’s at least a little bit because she worries what I’ll think of her. And yeah, that’s dumb, but that’s how it is. And it’s probably the same for Sollux too.”

“I just want to be able to be there for him. I know I’ve sucked at that so far...”

“No, you haven’t. And you are there for him.” Karkat looked less than convinced, so Dave stepped closer to him. “Looks like someone needs a hug ,” he said in a singsong voice.

“No I don’t, fuck off.”

“It’s okay, Karkat, just let it happen.” Dave lifted his arms.

“If you touch me I will literally claw your face off.”

“No you wouldn’t, that would be a crime against art.” Dave got his arms around Karkat’s shoulders and felt gratified when Karkat let his head rest against Dave’s shoulder with only a soft grumble.

Now that the hug had been successfully initiated Dave realised he had no idea what was supposed to happen next. How long was it supposed to last? Who was supposed to end the hug? Did he need to say something? God, he was sure to be getting this all kinds of wrong. But Karkat didn’t seem to notice anything amiss, and pulled away after a minute or so.

“Thanks,” he muttered, not quite looking at Dave, and then, as though he’d just realised what he’d said, he blushed deeply and added, “Shithead.”

Dave grinned. “Anytime, buttercup.”

***

When Dave thought about it, it struck him as kind of strange that Karkat, who was always so loud and grumpy, had such a fondness for romantic comedies. He’d known Karkat long enough that he’d just come to accept it, though, and anyway Karkat loved romcoms in the same way he did everything else – with a lot of shouting and cursing to hide the fact that he cared.

Now and then, Karkat invited everyone around to watch a movie together, even though he invariably ended up pissed off and ranting about everyone else's inability to appreciate fine cinema. Sometimes Dave thought that was just as much part of the appeal for him as the movie itself. Because he was a considerate friend, he helped Karkat out by asking stupid and irrelevant questions and pointing out minor continuity errors. When Karkat really got into a rant, he got an adorable crease between his eyebrows, and Dave wanted to see what would happen if he touched it with his thumb, but he held himself back . 

Well. Not that it was hard to restrain himself or anything, if he accidentally managed to imply otherwise. And he meant adorable in a strictly ironic way. Obviously. 

Rose came to most of their movie nights now, no longer quite as bound to Kanaya's apartment. She and Kanaya would sit together in the corner near the door to Dave's room, which he'd told Rose she could use as a sanctuary if she needed it . Kanaya doted on her like nothing Dave had ever seen before, but even so, he didn’t think Rose had talked to her like she promised yet.

"I thought it might be too big of a step," he pointed out during a gap between movies when Kanaya had excused herself to the ablution block, Sollux and WV were getting more snacks and Karkat was distracted by ranting at Gamzee and Tavros. "But that doesn't mean you're not doing better. A perigee ago, you wouldn't have agreed to come here tonight at all."

"Your impersonation of my mother is almost flawless, Dave. Rest assured, I am merely waiting for the right time, so you might as well stop anticipating signs of my failure."

"Look, you're the one who brought it up," Dave said, which was true. Rose had pre-empted his planned conversational gambit by muttering at him as soon as Kanaya left the room ; 'There's no need for that judgemental expression just because Kanaya and I haven’t boarded the makeout train yet.'

"If you're feeling that defensive, maybe it's because you’re trying to do something you’re not ready for."

"Stop condescending to me! It doesn't suit you, and don't think I can't tell you're just trying to distract me from what's going on between you and Karkat."

"What," said Dave, "the fuck. There's nothing going on between me and Karkat.”

"Exactly! But I've seen the way you look at him."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Unfortunately, what Rose meant remained a mystery as Sollux and WV returned at that point with food, Kanaya close on their heels. Dave felt abnormally self-conscious for the rest of the night, and every time Karkat said or did something Dave reflexively started to look at him, then caught himself, then looked but tried to be extremely casual about it, not... whatever Rose was suggesting. He probably looked like an enormous douche. Bro taught him that; nothing was less cool than someone trying really hard to be cool.

Right near the end of the movie, during the last scene where the two trolls finally admitted their concupiscent feelings, Karkat sniffled loudly and proclaimed that this was what all cinema should aspire to be . Dave looked at him and suddenly realised what Rose was talking about, because he caught himself grinning and knew it had to look sappy as fuck. He should probably try to play it a bit cooler but he couldn’t really be bothered. He'd rather watch Karkat, who was flushed and happy-looking, the way only a really good romance story made him, and examine the way the points of his not-very-sharp teeth were just visible between his lips, and they way his eyes were lit up, and...

And...

Fuck.

***

In the afternoons when Dave was finished with weapons training, he liked to bother WV at work. Well, he thought of it as bothering, but WV seemed to enjoy the company. Every day, shipments of canned goods arrived, and WV unloaded and catalogued them. His organisational system seemed a little... unorthodox, but Dave wasn’t going to criticise him for trying to liven up a boring job.

Today the main acquisition seemed to be 400 cans of tuna. WV used them to replace the lake which had been depleted when a supply run was dispatched the week before. Dave was pretty sure WV actually got sentimental when some of his precious cans were taken to feed the resistance fighters. Occasionally he drew or wrote messages on the labels, as though he hoped the cans would somehow find their way to PM and AR . Dave felt a little sorry for him . He hoped WV’s friends were okay.

He could tell that Karkat spent a lot of mornings with him, too, because quite often there were additions to Can Town which only Karkat could have come up with. For example, the combined duelling arena/coffeeshop Dave was looking at right now.

"So I see you've been hanging out with Karkat again," Dave said. WV nodded. He was wearing a sash with 'mayor' written on it now.

"Cool," Dave said. "Cool. So, uh... yeah, you... what do you think of him?"

WV waved his hands around in a way which managed to evoke Karkat's loud personality while also expressing affection. It made Dave smile .

"Yeah," he said. "Me too." And then, because he never knew when to shut up, he added, "He's really... I mean... he likes us too, doesn't he? I mean, of course he does because who wouldn't, we're the fucking best, but, you know, it's figuring out what that means exactly which is difficult ..."

He was mercifully interrupted when WV pushed a can of tomato soup into his hand. Dave stared down at the bright red label like it held all the answers .

"Thanks?" he said. "Are... you saying Karkat thinks I'm like soup?"

WV gave him a rather pitying look, and Dave sighed. He could usually interpret WV's meaning pretty easily, but not today. "Sorry," Dave said, reaching to give the soup back. "I'll figure it out, don't worry."

WV wouldn’t take the can back. "Are you sure?" Dave asked. "I don't want to mess up your system, or Can Town, or anything."

WV managed to convey with a series of gestures that Dave was welcome to take the soup but that he would appreciate it if Dave were to return the empty can afterwards, and also that he thought Dave needed to stop second-guessing himself and speak up.

"Thanks," said Dave. "That means a lot."

It was obvious when Dave thought about it. The soup represented him and Karkat, symbolic of the blood which had driven Karkat from Alternia and led to them meeting and becoming irrevocably connected . WV wanted him to make the soup and share it with Karkat and disclose his feelings of less-than-platonic affection. Karkat would be won over by the symbolism and act of consideration, and everything would be wonderful. 

But when Dave arrived home, something was clearly wrong. Kanaya was in the living room, pacing back and forth, her shoulders tense and her jaw tight. Karkat was sitting in a chair, watching her. Sollux was nowhere to be seen and nor was Rose, although it was unusual to see Kanaya in their apartment without her.

"It's not that she lied to me," Kanaya was saying, waving her hands in the air. "It's that I told her, over and over, that she should ask me for help if she needed it and that I'd understand if she had any problems, that she could tell me anything. But she still decided to do this rather than trust me!"

"What's going on?" Dave asked.

"Rose and Kanaya had a fight," Karkat explained. 

"She's drunk!" Kanaya exploded. "And she's being... particularly vicious. She said... well, I'd prefer not to repeat it."

Dave thought Kanaya would be a lot more likely to open up if it were just her and Karkat, and besides, he was concerned about Rose. "Is she okay? Is someone with her?"

Kanaya sighed. "She's back at the apartment, so far as I know. I couldn't stay there any longer."

"I'm going to check on her," said Dave. 

The apartment looked normal from the outside, and it was quiet. Dave knocked at the door a couple of times, then let himself in.

"Hello? It's Dave. Are you here, Rose?"

He found her in the bathroom, leaning over the load gaper. He grimaced and wet a cloth to wipe her face clean.

"What happened?"

"Fuck off, Dave," Rose mumbled. She seemed reluctant to move too far from the toilet. Dave got her a glass of water.

Rose reached for the water greedily, and Dave held it just out of reach. "Seriously," he said, "what happened?"

Rose examined the glass. Her calculating expression was a lot more transparent than Dave was used to.

"Kanaya's thinking about taking a new mission," she said. "On Pitchlark ."

"Another undercover mission? I thought that wasn't her thing."

"No, not undercover, just a combat mission." 

Rose didn’t offer anything further to explain her reaction, so Dave said, "I know you're worried, but Kanaya is tough."

"I'm not worried," Rose snapped.

"Oh, okay. Because the way you're acting, some people might assume that you're worried."

"Why the fuck would I be worried? She's certainly not worried about me."

"Well... good," said Dave hesitantly. "I think she is worried about you, though. She's with Karkat right now, all worked up over you getting drunk and not talking to her about what's on your mind. She wouldn't be doing that if she didn't care."

"So what! I'm sick of her caring. It's all she goes on about. 'Tell me what's bothering you' and 'are you okay' and 'is there anything I can do.' The best thing she could give me is five minutes of her not breathing down my neck."

"Rose... you're not making any sense."

"Your face doesn't make any sense."

"Wow," said Dave. He paused a moment to let the gravity of his reaction sink in. "So we're down to that level now, are we?" he asked rhetorically. "Your face," he paused dramatically, "makes so little sense that a group of post-graduate philosophy students spent a year analysing it, and concluded that it contained the meaning of life, and they won a Nobel Peace Prize for writing their thesis about it."

Rose's expression was blank, almost back to the carefully composed expression Dave was familiar with. Then she began to snicker. Just when Dave thought it might be safe to allow himself a chuckle or two, Rose stopped laughing and her lip trembled.

"I don't want her to go, Dave," she admitted. "I'm worried about her being hurt, of course I am, but that's not the real reason it bothers me so much. It would be acceptable to be upset out of concern, but really I'm just afraid I won't be able to cope without her."

Dave put a hand on Rose's arm, and she leaned against him.

"Karkat and I will look out for you," he said.

"Thank you. I know you will, but it's not the same ."

There was nothing to say to that, and if Dave couldn’t rely on his words he felt a bit lost, but he lifted his arm and let Rose lean against him while she cried.


	7. Chapter 7

Kanaya shipped out when Dave and Karkat were in their last week of training. Dave convinced Rose to move into their apartment . It was a tight fit, but Dave was worried about what would happen with Rose's drinking if she was left to her own devices. Rose was worried about it too, he was pretty sure.

Karkat moved his recuperacoon into Sollux’s block, and Rose took over the little room which Karkat had been sleeping in. She spent a lot of time in there, worrying about Kanaya or avoiding everyone else or whatever it was she did to pass the time. At first Dave told himself to give her time and space, but as the days passed without her showing any improvement, he began to worry.

Sollux was the one who knocked at the door until Rose let him in and sat with her quietly during the times when she couldn’t bear company but didn’t want to be alone. She avoided watching news transmissions but would pester Sollux for updates.

She did still drink more than he'd like, but she was doing better. If she had plenty to do during the day, she coped better . Sollux spent a lot of time with her, teaching her how to solve the various puzzles he’d used to build his dexterity again. If Dave didn't know, he’d never have guessed that a few months ago Sollux couldn't walk and could barely speak. Turned out Sollux was kind of an asshole, but a good guy. He and Rose took care of each other.

They were already hearing rumours about being deployed. It sounded like there was virtually no chance that Dave and Karkat wouldn’t be heading for Pitchlark after they were done training. Maybe the very same day they finished. Things sounded pretty dire.

Dave came home from training one day halfway through the week and found Rose and Sollux sitting on the sofa, Rose grasping a bottle of wine by the neck and staring Sollux down. Dave's first impulse was to rush into the room and snatch the bottle from Rose's hands, but they hadn’t seen him yet, and then Sollux began to speak.

"You know, out of everyone, I’m the one who understands what it’s like," he said. "Having every single action be out of your control. When I was in... in the ship, sometimes I’d.... It’s hard to explain, but with the psionics, if I pushed it to a certain point, it would stop making the ship go faster and just cause feedback. Pain. Sometimes I’d do it anyway because it was one of the only decisions that was up to me. The thing is, I’m not there anymore, and you’re not... you don't have to hurt yourself just because that’s the only choice you can make.”

"I’m not sure I can help but make terrible choices," Rose said bitterly. "Kanaya's gone, and I never told her... what if she doesn't come back? And soon Dave will be gone too, and I don't know if I can... he's probably just going to think I don't care. I've tried so hard to convince everyone around me that I couldn't care less, and now I wish I could take it all back."

“So why don’t you?" Sollux asked

Rose sighed and Dave held his breath. She stood and walked into the kitchen, where she poured the wine down the sink. When she turned back around she caught sight of Dave in the doorway.

"Oh... hello," she said. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Not that long," said Dave, but he was pretty sure Rose could see through him. He wasn't even trying very hard to hide his feelings.

Rose gave him a knowing look. Yes, he definitely hadn't fooled her. "Well," she said, placing the empty bottle on the counter, "I suppose this is as good a time as any to say that... whatever happens, don't do anything stupid and get yourself killed. I would be... rather displeased."

"You don't have to convince me," Dave said. "I will do my best to not die. No dead Daves. Dead Daves are the enemy."

"Good. So long as we're in agreement," said Rose gravely, and Dave nodded. Then, pushing down his nervousness, he moved in to hug her.

"Really, Dave? This is not dignified," Rose complained, but she didn't pull away .

***

Dave and Karkat finished their training with a remarkable lack of ceremony . Their bags were back in the apartment, already packed. They had an hour between completing their final assessment and needing to report to the transport hub, an hour which they spent eating dinner with their friends.

It was a sombre occasion. Dave felt like he'd already said everything he wanted to say, and no one talked very much. He hugged WV and fist-bumped Tavros. Karkat hugged Gamzee but couldn’t bring himself to look at Sollux. Dave was pretty sure they’d had some huge heart-to-heart last night. No one was happy.

Rose had been avoiding him all day, and Dave only managed to corner her when she took the dishes into the kitchen to wash.

“I’m going to message you on Trollian every damn day,” he said. “I’m going to spend even more time annoying you than I already do.”

He was trying to lighten the mood, but Rose was having none of it. “It’s just typical that I would lose you so soon after finding you again.”

“You’re not losing me, Rose,” Dave insisted. “I’m going to be fine, and you’re going to be fine. This is only going to be temporary.”

“Take care of yourself,” she said, but she sounded forlorn, like she’d already come to the conclusion that she’d never see him again.

Still thinking of that cheery parting , Dave shouldered his bag, and he and Karkat boarded the vehicle which would take them to the hub. It was the most privacy they were likely to get for a while, and Dave let his fingers brush the back of Karkat's hand. He didn’t want to end up with the same regrets Rose had.

"I wish we didn't have to go," he admitted quietly. 

"Me either," said Karkat. Dave felt his heart beat a little harder, because even though they'd definitely talked about some of their fears over the past few weeks, Karkat had never admitted what Dave just did. That he wished they could stay, forget about fighting and the war and just continue living ordinary lives and being safe .

"I'm glad we're together, though," said Dave, turning his hand so that he was almost holding Karkat's. 

Karkat didn’t reply straight away, and just as Dave began to withdraw his hand, cursing himself for his cowardice, Karkat moved, wrapping his fingers around Dave's wrist. "Me too. If I'm going to get my stupid ass killed, I'm glad it'll be next to you, you asshole ."

Every joke which came to mind seemed to be in poor taste, so Dave just said, "Neither of us is going to die." Immediately, he wished he'd just made light of the possibility. He felt like acknowledging it had made the danger too real.

"You won't. I won't let you," Karkat said, and he squeezed Dave's hand. Dave laughed, breathless and more than a little hysterical, and Karkat grinned at him.

The hub was too busy and had too many people racing around. They got on their shuttle and it was quieter, but it was still crowded, trolls and humans and various other aliens crammed in next to each other. Dave was glad for the excuse to press up against Karkat's side, but then Karkat held his hand again and Dave thought he probably didn’t even need an excuse, not now.

They were briefed during the flight. The area they were heading for used to be very built-up, but after being a warzone for over five years there wasn’t much left. 

"We'll land within a secured area, and you will all need to remain within that area unless on a sanctioned mission. You will carry your identification pass at all times outside of your personal quarters. You will rigorously adhere to all security procedures."

The apprehension Dave had been feeling when he boarded the transport was growing worse. His and Karkat's jokes and promises aside, it was starting to sound more and more like they weren’t going to survive this.

What he saw when they landed did little to reassure him. The landing site was a patch of scorched dirt surrounded by barbed wire fences . Armed guards surrounded the perimeter. Dave and Karkat, along with the rest of the passengers, were hustled out of the ship and marched north. They entered a city – or what used to be a city – in every direction Dave could see the remains of tall buildings. The ground was covered with rubble, and a narrow path had been cleared through it so that they could walk quickly. 

They arrived at their barracks, which were housed in a relatively intact building with makeshift repairs covering the broken windows and the holes in the roof. Dave and Karkat were assigned to a room which they shared with three other trolls, and then...

And then nothing. For all the hurrying they got along the way, now that they'd arrived there seemed to be nothing to do but wait. It made Dave antsy, and he tried to remind himself that this was normal. Ninety percent of war was waiting.

The base was inhabited not just by resistance forces from Mennara, but troops from other planets in the galaxy and even further than that. Most interestingly, there was a sizeable contingent of humans.

Dave chatted with a few of them, hungry for news of Earth . "Things are more stable there now," said one of the soldiers, a woman named Haley. "That's why they could spare so many of us for this mission. If you ask me, I think the Condesce is giving up on Earth. She's got other targets which are easier and more worthwhile to conquer."

That was encouraging, if it was true. Dave considered asking about his bro, but he decided against it. If the news was bad, he didn’t want to know.

Every day he took note of the mundane, unremarkable events that he could tell Rose and Sollux about via Trollian. The things that wouldn’t worry them or violate security. Rose, in turn, passed on the news she had of Kanaya, although it seemed she wasn’t able to contact Rose very often. Dave welcomed every update nonetheless.

Most of Dave's time was spent on sentry duty. Sometimes at the landing field if a ship was coming in, but more often on the outskirts of the city, watching for empire aircraft flying over on bombing raids. The best times were when he and Karkat were on duty together and they could spend the long, uneventful shifts talking and talking .

He learned about Karkat's childhood on Alternia, how careful he’d had to be to conceal the colour of his mutant blood. They talked a lot about Sollux and what he used to be like before he was taken and turned into a helmsman. It was obvious that Karkat still worried about him.

He told Karkat about growing up on Earth, about his earliest memories living in an apartment in the city, back when Earth still had cities. He didn’t talk about the empire ships arriving, but he told Karkat about the remote island he and Bro escaped to, them and a handful of other humans. He told Karkat all about the friends he made there, John and Jade, and Rose who Karkat knew but whose sarcasm used to be so much sharper. 

One night, when they were hiding in a shelter together waiting to see if the siren they'd heard was a false alarm or if they were about to be showered in bombs , Dave told Karkat about the raid which took him from Earth.

"Bro and Rose's mom and John's dad and most of the other adults were going to carry out a raid on an empire base. I was so pissed off because they were leaving us behind. I didn't speak to Bro for days, I didn't..." Dave's voice petered out and Karkat shuffled closer so that they were pressed tightly together, shoulder to hip. "Jake – Jade’s grandad – he was meant to look after us. When the raiders came he went to fight them, and Jade went looking for him, and that... I haven't seen either of them since. I don't know if they're alive or dead."

Dave could feel Karkat pressed up against his side, not moving and barely breathing as though that would help him concentrate better on Dave’s story. When Dave went quiet, Karkat shifted so that he could hold Dave’s hand, and Dave squeezed his hand in return until Karkat’s claws pricked at his fingertips.

“I’m sorry,” Karkat said. “I don’t... I wish...” He made a quiet, frustrated noise, something Dave understood from the times he’d wanted to comfort Rose or Sollux and not known how. “I want to... fuck.” 

Dave didn’t realise what mental debate Karkat was having with himself until he shifted again, loosening his grip on Dave’s hand and turning slightly so that he could press his lips to the corner of Dave’s mouth. Dave froze up, because he’d been thinking about kissing Karkat for weeks, months, and when it finally happened it was in a filthy hole in the ground where the walls kept shaking from the bombs instead of something romantic like Karkat probably would have liked. It happened because his story had made Karkat feel sorry for him.

Karkat broke the kiss off after a few seconds, and Dave belatedly tried to reciprocate but Karkat had already pulled back and was leaning away from Dave, scowling.

“I’m sorry,” said Karkat. “I shouldn’t have... I thought... I’m such a dumbass.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Dave insisted. “I wanted to, I just...”

“Just what?” Karkat demanded, so Dave explained what he’d been thinking. Karkat rolled his eyes. “I take it back. You’re the dumbass,” he said. “I don’t know what’s more romantic than that story you just told me. Humans have the weirdest fucking ideas about romance. And I really don’t know what could be more badass than making out without a care in the world while there are literal bombs dropping yards away.”

When Karkat put it like that, it was hard to argue with him.

 

After the first week on Pitchlark things began to change. The air strikes became more frequent, and more serious. There was new damage to the city every day. There was at least one siren every shift, and more often than not they had to run for one of the underground shelters where they hid and listened to the bombs and hoped that this wouldn’t be the time one of them fell too close.

 

Dave began to have trouble sleeping, even on the quiet nights. He thought Karkat might be having trouble too, although he didn’t say anything about it. He was definitely more irritable than usual, which was quite a feat.

After mandatory PT one day, Dave was heading out to get some lunch when he heard someone shouting behind him.

He didn’t take much notice at first; he was hungry and tired and that was definitely more important than some asshole flapping his jaw. But the guy kept going, and then Dave heard something which sounded like his name.

He turned around just in time to take a full body tackle right to the chest. The guy's arms were everywhere, and he was still shouting "Dave! Dave! Dave!" like a broken fucking record and it was John. The guy was John, years older and a foot taller, with some serious biceps and glasses which actually didn’t look too big for his face and honest-to-god grey strands in his jet-black hair .

"You're alive!" he said. "Dave, you're alive!" Like Dave maybe hadn't noticed .

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Dave demanded, because he liked to focus on what was important.

"Fighting the empire, of course," John said, like it was obvious. Maybe it was. "I can't believe you're here! We looked for you for so long , and we finally saw that there was a D Strider deployed here, and we all hoped it was really you!"

"We?"

John's expression dimmed a fraction. "Roxy and Jake and Jade and my dad and your bro," he says. Dave waited, stunned into silence. "They... uh... rescued me, a few days after you were taken. We tried to find you and Rose, but we just couldn't. Oh god, Rose. We still don't know where she is."

"I do," said Dave. "She's back on Mennara with some friends."

John gaped at him. "She's okay?"

He couldn’t answer that. "She's alive."

John either didn’t pick up on the implicit warning in Dave's words or was too relieved to care. "The others are going to be so happy when they find out! Come on, we should go see them right now!"

John turned immediately and began to walk up the street. Dave didn’t move. 

"They're here?" He didn’t understand the sense of trepidation suddenly filling him. What was there to be afraid of?

John stopped and turns back to him. "Yeah," he said. "The Earth delegation has been staying in a block down in the south-east. They'll all be there at this time of day."

If anything that heightened Dave's reluctance, and John looked worried as he picked up on it. "What's wrong?"

"I can't," he said hating himself for being such a coward. He'd done this to Rose, hadn't he, sprung his appearance on her without ever considering whether it might be difficult for her. "John, I'm sorry. I can't see them."

"What?" John asked, his tone betraying total incomprehension. 

"I'm sorry!" Dave repeated desperately. "I would if I could, but I just can't."

"So... what? You're just not ever going to see them again?"

"No! I mean, I don't know." He didn’t want to never see them again, but nor did he want to see them when he felt like this. 

"What am I supposed to do, lie about the fact that you're here?" John demanded. He sounded angry and hurt, and Dave wanted to claw his skin off .

"No, I don't want you to lie. And I want to see them, but I can't. I'm not ready, I don't know how I can talk to them."

John gave a quiet laugh. "That doesn't make any sense. Of course you can talk to them, just like you talked to them before. They haven't changed."

Maybe they hadn’t changed, but Dave had, no matter how much he'd tried to avoid admitting that to himself. He just shook his head.

"Will you at least see Jade?" John asked sadly. "She feels... it would make her really happy to see you."

Something pulled in Dave's chest, sharp and painful. He'd missed Jade; he'd missed her so much. He'd missed all of them, but for three years every time he'd thought of Jade he'd remembered her leaving them to find and protect her grandpa. He'd remembered not knowing if she'd even survived the day.

He told John where to find him, and John said he'd bring Jade by in a couple of hours. Dave immediately wanted to take the invitation back. That was too soon, he needed more time, but John had already run off, waving over his shoulder, and it was too late.

He went home and broke the news to Karkat, who didn’t really understand why it was such a big deal but was concerned anyway because Dave was so upset. Dave was so far from deserving Karkat that he had a hard time understanding how things had ended up this way. 

"Why don't you want to see her?" Karkat asked.

"I do want to see her," Dave insisted. "It's just that I don't really know... how this is going to work. It's like taking a little kid to see Santa at the mall . The whole way there they bug you about elves and reindeer and presents until you want to strangle yourself, but then you arrive and Santa smells like pot and his teeth are nicotine stained, and the reindeer are just cardboard cut-outs and the elves' costumes don't fit properly. You know what I mean?"

"Not only do I have no idea what you mean, I'm ninety percent sure you don't either."

"She's gonna be disappointed," said Dave. "She's gonna look at me and know..."

"And know what?"

"Just... stuff. She'll know I didn't turn out to be as badass as I always pretended to be, okay?"

Karkat looked at him and shook his head. "You're such a fucking dumbass I'm amazed you survived long enough for us to meet," he says. "If Rose said to you what you said to me, you'd chuck a fit, don't pretend you wouldn't."

"That's diff-"

Karkat stopped him, waggling a finger in front of his nose. "You don't want to finish that sentence."

Dave fell silent and it was so awkward he actually felt relieved someone knocked on the door. Not relieved enough to answer the door himself; he made Karkat do that, but still.

Karkat tried to do things properly according to human etiquette, sticking his hand out and smiling . Dave realised that Karkat might be a bit nervous himself about meeting people who were so important to Dave. He was such an ass for not thinking of that. He didn’t have time to dwell on it, though, because Jade didn’t even seem to see Karkat. She barrelled through the door and headed straight for Dave, laughing and hiccupping with tears in her eyes.

"Dave, Dave, you're really here!"

She flung herself at him and Dave nearly fell over. He reached up to return the hug by reflex and then realised that he wasn’t going to want to let go any time soon.

"John told me Rose is safe too, but she's not here?"

Dave explained what he'd been doing the past few months, and how he found Rose. He wasn’t sure how much to tell them. He normally wouldn't be troubled, but Rose had been tight-lipped about the details of what happened to her, even towards Dave who'd experienced similar things. Who knew what she'd be comfortable sharing with John and Jade, who couldn’t possibly begin to understand what it was like.

"She's been having a hard time," he settled for at last, and Jade and John nodded understandingly. Something in his tone must have warned them away from asking for more details.

They didn’t extend Dave the same courtesy, though. "What happened to you?" John asked. "I didn't get time to ask you earlier."

"How did you escape?" Jade asked. Dave could work with that. He could tell that story without falling into a pit of self-loathing, and maybe they wouldn’t even notice that he was trying to distract them.

"I was part of a unit that was supposed to be building the roads for this huge military base," Dave said. He could see Karkat's interested expression from the corner of his eye and realised he'd never shared this with him.

"One day, the surface-layer broke and just started spraying hot tar everywhere. It was this old piece of shit, I'm amazed it didn't break sooner than it did." Dave didn’t mention that all the equipment they'd used had been old and unsafe, nor how common fatal accidents were. Forget the surface-layer, it was a miracle that _he’d_ lasted as long as he did. "A bunch of the other workers got sprayed, and some of the guards too, and the remaining guards were busy trying to shut it off, so I ran for it while everyone was distracted. I hid on a space shuttle in dock, and that took off after a few hours, before anyone even thought to come looking for me. That's how I met Karkat."

Finally, a topic Dave was a lot more comfortable talking about. He could feel himself loosening up, making the whole thing sound a lot cooler and more fun than it actually was. He encouraged Karkat to join in, and he did, a little bit, but he seemed to prefer listening to Dave recount what happened.

After a while, Dave heard a pesterchum notification, and John pulled out his cell phone with a guilty expression. "It's Dirk," John said, and Dave went stiff. "He's waiting outside."

"He's _what_?"

"He asked if he could come along. I couldn't say no, Dave, but he promised he'd wait outside and you wouldn't have to see him if you didn't want. I'm sorry, I just... he's your brother, I didn't know how to say no."

Dave forced himself to take some deep breaths and reminded himself that it wasn’t reasonable to feel as betrayed as he did. It was just... he was hoping for more time, so that he could be better, stronger, cooler, before he had to see Bro .

"I'll tell him not to come in," said John. 

"No," said Dave. God no. Now that Bro was outside, Dave had to see him. Refusing would be as good as admitting that he was weak, that he was scared. "It's fine. Tell him to come in."

It wasn’t fine. Not even slightly. 

John sent a message, and seconds later there was a tap at the door. Karkat opened it because Dave's feet refused to move, and Bro was on the other side. 

He didn’t look a day older than when Dave last saw him. He was still wearing the same pointy shades, and had the same bland smirk on his face. It shouldn't have hurt so much to see him.

It was never really Bro who took care of him. John's grandma kept him fed, and John's dad made sure he had clean clothes to wear. Bro's job was mostly to train Dave to fight, and he was a complete hardass about it, but Dave had understood why it was necessary. Jade's grandad had kept an eye on things, made sure Bro didn't go overboard, and Roxy had been there whenever he needed someone to talk to. Dave and Bro had never been close.

He didn’t remember much about the time before they fled to the island, but the little he did suggested that Bro wasn't great at looking after him. Dave was probably better off this way, with most of his upbringing being taken over by other people, but Bro's approval still mattered more to him than anyone else's. It always had. He didn’t even understand it.

"Dave," said Bro. He nodded his head once.

"Bro," said Dave, mimicking the gesture.

Karkat led John and Jade away into the kitchen, giving them some privacy. Dave wasn’t sure whether to be thankful or not.

"It's good to see you," said Bro.

Dave blinked at him. He didn’t know how to respond to that. The words were not what he'd expected to hear, but Bro still had that unmoving expression, his eyes hidden by shades, and Dave couldn’t tell how he meant it. He'd forgotten how this worked. He couldn’t remember what he should say .

He said, "You too," because he'd been quiet too long and he had to say something, even if it was the wrong thing.

Bro nodded, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and Dave realised he was uncomfortable. His unflappable brother had no more idea how to handle this situation than Dave did .

"I hope you didn't miss me too much," said Dave. He was pretty sure that was something he would have said, before. He thought he had the inflection right, so it sounded like he was saying, 'you better have missed me, asshole, but I don't really give a shit if you didn't.' In a second, Bro would tell Dave he’d barely noticed he was gone, and everything would be normal.

"I haven't..." Bro began, then trailed off. "I haven't had a decent night's sleep since we lost you," he said at last. "Been too worried."

Dave was so grateful for his shades. They'd help him hide his expression while he tried to work out what Bro meant, peel back the various layers of irony and figure out how to respond. But it was taking him too long and his shades wouldn’t hide the way he was pressing his lips together so hard they feel stuck together.

"Are you okay?" Bro asked. He lifted a hand like he wanted to reach for Dave, lowered it like he wasn’t sure it would be welcome. 

Dave shook his head, because there was no point trying to continue the pretence. Doing so would just make him look even more pathetic. "Sorry," he whispered .

"It's fine," said Bro, and he lifted his hands up again. Dave moved towards them this time. He couldn’t help himself.

"Sorry," he said again, and then he and Bro were toe to toe. The hand Bro was holding up brushed his arm. 

"It's fine," repeated Bro, and he put that hand on Dave's shoulder. He only needed the slightest nudge to lean in, and then Bro's arms were around him and Dave had his face against Bro's shoulder and this didn’t happen. There was no way this was really happening. But Dave waited and it kept happening, and if he left a damp spot on Bro's shirt he didn’t say anything about it .


	8. Chapter 8

Of course, Dave's time on Pitchlark was never going to be limited to sentry duty and training drills, no matter how much he wished otherwise. They were here to capture and hold territory from the empire, and so far all they’d been managing was to hold their own.

A new influx of fresh recruits arrived, some from Mennara, some from other places, and with them came rumours that soon the resistance would be taking the offense.

The air strikes continued, and although they seemed less frequent Dave thought they did more damage when they did appear. Karkat said it was a good sign, that the empire was having to manage its resources more carefully to maximise the damage it needed to inflict. Maybe he was right. 

Then Dave and Karkat, along with several hundred other troops from Mennara, were called into a briefing. They'd been chosen to take part in a mission, and they were to leave in four days.

Dave could tell John wasn’t happy about it. "We only just found you, and you're leaving? It's going to be so dangerous!"

It wasn’t the kind of thing Dave needed to hear. Besides, John had no room to complain. Dave knew he'd seen combat since he was rescued and expected to see more here on Pitchlark. Dave had no interest in being coddled.

It was Roxy who Dave really struggled with when the time came to tell her, because she didn’t make a fuss about it at all. She looked worried and sad, and patted Dave's arm when she heard the news, but she only said encouraging things and Dave knew it was because she didn’t want to make things any harder for him, regardless of how she felt about it herself. It killed him .

They were issued with new equipment and upgraded weapons and spent hours packing fifty pounds of gear into a backpack small enough to fit on a dinner plate, and the night before they left Dave and Karkat were summoned to the major's office.

A special assignment, he said. The leader of the expedition requested them specifically. Dave wasn’t surprised in the slightest to learn that the leader the major was referring to was Jade's grandpa, and the expedition he was leading consisted of John, Jade, Roxy, Jane, Dirk and John’s dad. He wasn’t even upset about it, just relieved. Karkat might have been pissed, except that the mission they'd been moved to was going to be both important and challenging. Every one of them would be a hero if they succeeded . 

The heiress had a few contacts in the empire, trolls who, for whatever reason, had chosen to betray the Condesce by leaking information to the resistance. One of them had been discovered, and even now, was being held in a cell deep in the empire's enclave on Pitchlark. Their mission was to rescue him, not merely because he was an ally, but also because he had information he had yet to share with them . 

"That's only half the mission," Jade revealed as they were in the transport heading towards their departure point. "He's being held at the empire's most secure airfield. We're going to go in and sabotage the airships. We've got four days, and then the main resistance forces are going to move out. When they do, we want to make sure they’re not going to be bombarded by the Empire’s air force."

The transport reached the end of a rugged dirt track and stopped. From here they'd be on foot, and they were going to have to set a cracking pace to pull this off.

Dave was a bit embarrassed to find that Jane and Jake both managed the hike better than he did. Sure, he'd been training, but it had only been a few months, and if he was being honest he was perhaps a bit less diligent about it than he should have been. He obviously had some catching up to do.

Roxy had the map. They already had their ideal campsite for each night marked on it. Tonight, they were hoping to reach a dense patch of forest surrounding a lake. There were no empire forces nearby that they knew of, and there would be plenty of cover.

Dave walked next to Karkat for most of the day, but there was an hour or two where Roxy kept him company. He didn’t mind it too much; mostly she walked next to him quietly and didn’t try to get him to talk. Dave had spoken to everyone since John found him that day, but he'd avoided being around everyone at once like this, and he wasn’t very comfortable with it.

At one point, about halfway through the second hour, Roxy said, "Your young man seems very taken with you."

"He's not-" Dave started, but he didn’t finish the sentence, because there was no point. Karkat probably was his young man, not that he'd ever put it like that himself .

"Your brother was worried about you," she said. Dave couldn’t hold in a snort, even though he and Bro had talked and what Roxy was saying was probably true. "I mean it," Roxy went on. "We all... not knowing is worse than anything else. It means you just imagine all the worst possibilities happening at once.”

Dave knew that. It was what he dealt with every time he thought of Rose and John over the past three years.

"I know you don't want to worry me, Dave, but that only makes me worry more. Can you tell me about Rose?"

And when she put it like that, he couldn’t refuse. Dave told her what he knew, even though it meant admitting how much he'd had to guess. He told her about the drinking and didn’t miss the guilt which flashed across Roxy's face. He hadn't seen her drunk since John found him, not even tipsy. He wondered if that was new for this mission, or if it had been going on for a while.

Once he was done, Roxy looked different. Better. There was a tired expression around her eyes, but she stood like a weight had been lifted from her. "Thank you, Dave," she said, and it was too nice, too kind, given what he'd had to tell her, but Dave said, “You're welcome,” anyway .

***

They made camp in a nice little spot, thick with trees which were full of brightly coloured birds . They pitched their tents in a circle around where the campfire would go if they were willing to risk lighting one. Instead they had granola and jerky for dinner and set a watch schedule through a complicated round of rock-paper-scissors. Dave was on second watch, which guaranteed he'd get virtually no sleep. He didn’t really care.

He was sharing a tent with Karkat. It made sense, with them being the two most recent additions to the expedition. The others had probably made their sleeping arrangements already. It still kind of made Dave embarrassed when he wondered what the others were assuming about them.

He didn’t miss that Bro was sharing a tent with Jake . He remembered when they were new on the island and Bro had the most ridiculous infatuation with him. Jake had been on top of things and actually pretty cool with some of the stunts he'd managed to pull off, and now Dave could see in hindsight that Bro had just lost his home and had to flee the country while caring for a preschooler, so someone as capable as Jake must have been appealing. And Dave could admit now that he wasn't unattractive either, for an old guy. Bro would have murdered him if he'd ever mentioned it, but his crush had been impossible to miss. He'd thought Bro had got over it, but maybe he was wrong.

He needed to stop thinking about Bro and Jake. He noticed that Roxy was sharing a tent with John's dad, even though they were still pretending to be just good friends for some reason Dave couldn’t comprehend. Jane was sharing a slightly larger tent with Jade and John, and that left Dave with Karkat. 

Karkat wasn’t thrilled with the sleeping accommodations. They couldn’t carry a recuperacoon around with them, any more than they could carry a week's worth of sopor slime. Karkat had tried to make a pile out of dead leaves, only to give up in disgust when he unearthed an alarmingly large spider. Dave felt bad for him, but this way he got to shuffle over right up next to Karkat, put an arm around his waist and tuck his face against Karkat's shoulder. It was nice. He never got to hold Karkat through the night like this. It was nice even if Karkat was certain to wake up screaming from nightmares in a few hours time. 

At least there was no chance of Dave sleeping through his watch.

***

The second day was harder. There was no path to follow and the forest was thick. John's dad and Roxy were blazing a trail for them while Jake had the map and kept them from getting lost. They didn’t make as good time as they were hoping, and when they reached a steep hill right around the time they'd normally be eating dinner, they glanced around at one another and unanimously decided to stop early for the night.

They heated up some dehydrated food and made some awful instant coffee. Jade earned Dave's undying gratitude for all of eternity when she gave him a sly look and produced a bottle of AJ from her backpack.

"I made sure to pack it before we left Earth, even though Grandpa said I should save room for other things," she said while Dave caressed the label reverently. "And I think we could all use a pick-me-up tonight ."

Dave tried to savour the drink as much as he could, but it was hard to stop himself draining the bottle in one gulp. He shared a taste with Karkat, who'd never had apple juice before and didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. He pronounced it overrated. Dave was sure he'd manage to forgive Karkat someday .

There was only one bottle, and Dave kept it in his pack even though it was just taking up space.

The third day, they marched hard to make up for lost time. The forest began to thin out, which was useful in theory but in reality just meant they had less cover as they got closer to the empire base. They made camp that night in a narrow crevice, the only bit of cover for miles. It was the worst night's sleep Dave had had in a long time, with rocks digging into his back and nowhere level to stretch out , and Karkat grumbling two feet away as he tried to find a comfortable position. Dave tried to rest as best he could, though, because tomorrow was The Day.

Not long after midday, they reached the area where empire soldiers patrolled the perimeter of their base. They stopped there and made their preparations, changing into empire uniforms. They'd be posing as slaves and going in under the pretence of working at headquarters. It was the best way to get close to their contact. Karkat would be doing the same; his mutant blood had become a lot more evident in the months since Dave met him. He'd have no chance of passing as a free troll. He was going to have trouble passing as a slave, given that most trolls with a mutation like his would be culled before reaching adulthood, but no one looked at slaves that closely. They should be okay.

They equipped tiny communicators, in case they got split up. Jane sat everyone down and made them review the map of the empire base one last time. It wasn’t complete or up to date, but it was all they had. They left most of their supplies in a hollow they scooped out under a tree and marked with an x cut into the bark. Carrying all that stuff into the base would attract too much attention. They'd need to come back this way if they wanted to collect supplies for their journey back.

They set out, keeping to a strict formation. Bro was on point, with Jake right behind him, rifle at the ready. Roxy was on the right flank, John on the left, with Jane and Jade bringing up the rear. Dave, Karkat and John's dad kept to the middle, backup firepower for Roxy and John. They couldn’t afford to be seen until they got closer to the base; no slaves would be allowed out here. If they did get spotted, they would have to make sure the sentries couldn’t pass a warning on to anyone else.

It looked like a bad fire had gone through here. Probably lit deliberately, to remove cover around the base. They moved in a crouch at first, then at a crawl. It wasn’t just patrols they had to worry about; airships flew over frequently as well. At least they were probably too high up to see them if they didn’t move.

It was afternoon by the time they reached a more populated area. Dave's eyes felt gritty and sore. Any adrenaline which might have boosted his flagging energy had long since worn off. They looked pretty grubby after the days they’d spent hiking through the wilderness, but that shouldn't pose too much of an issue at this time of day. Only the lowest-status slaves who did the dirtiest jobs would be around at this hour.

Now they could hurry without drawing attention to themselves. They walked briskly, almost running, with their eyes down and their minds on their task. Dave could feel his heart speeding up, and it wasn’t because of the exercise. He remembered this, running frantically from one task to the other, hoping not to be noticed, always looking for more work to do because you were less likely to get fucked with if you looked like you were busy toiling for the empire. He hadn’t thought it would bother him so much to sneak in like this, knowing it was just pretence. He hadn't thought it would feel so real .

They reached the middle of the base without too much trouble. It actually got easier as it became more crowded and the size of their group wasn’t so noticeable. So of course, just as it became easier for them to stick together, the time came for them to split up.

Dave and Karkat were going with Roxy, John and John’s dad to rescue their informer, while the rest of them were going to sabotage the empire airships. A heartfelt farewell would have been appropriate, but would have attracted too much attention. Bro veered off without looking back, while Jade glanced back at Dave and tried to smile. It looked rather sickly, but he appreciated the effort.

Roxy took them in search of a way into the headquarters of the base, which proved to be a real challenge. Most slaves didn’t have access, and they didn’t have anything which would allow them to pretend they did.

They hovered around the rear entrance for a short while, hoping that they could slip in with a group of other slaves without being noticed. There was no such luck; not only did a guard scan something around the right wrist of every single slave, they got to see one of them, a tall slender carapacian, be dragged away because there was something wrong with hers.

"Well, we won't get in that way," John’s dad observed.

No shit, Dave thought.

Luckily, they didn't come all this way without a good few gadgets up their sleeves. They moved along the street to a lane which looked like it was intended for deliveries. There was a tall chain link gate with a padlock; they all stood around in front of the gate and pretended to be repairing a hole in the pavement while Roxy picked the lock.

Once in the alley and relatively hidden from view, John went about breaking a window. They needed to move quickly before they were noticed, but they still had to be careful. They couldn’t climb through a window if someone was on the other side. They couldn’t make any noise, and if they could manage it they needed to not leave any sign that something was amiss once they were inside.

They found a window which appeared to open into a small empty room, and John took out one of his smaller hammers and carefully, almost delicately, rapped around the edges of the window. Rather than shattering the glass into dozens of pieces, cracks appeared around the edges until he was able to remove most of the pane in one piece. Dave was reluctantly impressed .

Once they were inside, Karkat took out a sheet of thick cardboard and placed it in the window frame. They swept the few glass shards under a chair and left the window looking as though it had been broken and hastily patched to await being properly repaired.

Their hope was that, now they had made it inside without incident, the guards would assume they were allowed to be there and not question them. They needed to look calm and busy, like they belonged.

They didn’t all leave the room together. John’s dad and Roxy went out first, to see what was in the immediate area and report back. 

"If we're not back in ten minutes, assume we're caught and come looking," Roxy said, which did nothing for Dave's nerves.

They came back after eight minutes, just when Dave thought he was about to gnaw his own fingernails off from worrying. They looked satisfied. 

"This is some kind of service area," said Roxy. "There's a big laundry down to the right, and it sounds like there's a kitchen in the other direction. We didn't see anyone nearby except for other slaves."

Perfect. They slipped out of the room in twos and threes, keeping each other in view but trying not to look like they were all together. Roxy deployed the little gadget she'd been keeping safe in her pack all this time, a tiny remote-controlled robot which sent a camera feed back to them. This was what they'd use to find the target.

It was risky, because if anyone noticed it the whole base would be put on high alert. But it was very small, and Roxy used the remote like an expert, keeping the robot by the walls and in the shadows, always seeming to know when no one was watching and when to freeze. The rest of them watched with no small amount of awe as she built a map of the base, from the ground floor up, from the ablution block used by the slaves to the luxurious quarters where the commanding officers slept.

They thought their target would be somewhere nearby, down in the dirty unglamorous quarters of the base. He wasn’t, though. Just down the hall from the commander of the base was a room with two guards posted outside.

Karkat laughed when he learned the rest of them were surprised. "You guys don't get trolls at all," he said. "This guy's a traitor, sure. They're probably planning the best way to torture him to death right now. But he's still a violetblood ."

And when Dave thought about it, he could see what Karkat meant. It made sense. He should have realised.

It meant that it would be more difficult than anticipated to get to him. They retreated back to their little room to plan a bit more, always conscious of their time slipping away.

"I'm going to get in contact with Colonel Ranita," John’s dad said, taking their communicator off to a corner.

"I'm going back out there," Karkat said. "Just to get more of an idea of what's going on."

"I'll come with you, watch your back," Dave offered.

"No," Karkat said, although he smiled as he said it. "It'll be easier if I'm by myself. I won't be long."

True to his word, Karkat was only gone for about twenty minutes, and he returned with a basket of something hot which smelled delicious, and an extremely self-satisfied expression.

"Here," he said. "Fresh grubloaf. I told the kitchen workers I was taking it to the mess."

It was pretty good, for something with a name like grubloaf. Definitely far better than the dried and reconstituted food they'd been eating since they left the resistance base.

"It's the eighth day of the third perigee of the second bright season," Karkat said, as though he thought they'd understand what that meant. He took in their blank expressions and rolled his eyes.

"There's a festival tomorrow. The celebration of the victory of General Antiri. It's a day to remember the victories of Alternia's greatest military heroes. There'll be a feast and probably a parade and all sorts of bullshit. Promotions get announced and sometimes there are executions of condemned prisoners. Everyone who's anyone will be there."

There was a few beats of silence. "You say that like it's good news," Roxy said at last, "but it doesn't sound like it's gonna make things any easier for us."

"Think about it!" Karkat bellowed, waving his arms. "Who's going to be on guard duty while everyone else is off celebrating and eating themselves stupid? Only underperformers and losers on punishment detail, that's who. Tomorrow is the day when our guy will have the weakest possible security."

John’s dad approached hesitantly, communicator down at his side. "Well," he said, "Colonel Ranita said that they’ve had to move up the schedule. The first squads have already left, but most of the resistance forces will be moving out in the morning. The empire is going to be on high alert, but they won’t be expecting us to be here, right in their headquarters."

They all looked at John’s dad and then, in unison, turned back to look at Karkat. "We can do this," he insisted, jaw sticking out. 

Roxy and Karkat took the job of convincing the slaves working downstairs that they were new arrivals, brought in just in time to help with the preparations for the celebration. Dave should have gone along to help. He knew it, but he couldn't make himself do it

That was probably better anyway. Karkat at least knew something about trolls, and Roxy was so friendly. They'd probably have the whole base wrapped around their fingers by lunchtime.

Roxy continued using her small surveillance robot to build a better, more complete map of the base, as well as tracking the movements of the people who lived there .

"The guards change shifts at midnight and again at five am," she said. "The early morning change is our best bet, right when the celebrations are in full swing."

Dave went with John's dad to track down a better place to hide, something more secluded. They moved all their supplies and then set about preparing the equipment they would need to pull this off.

"The hardest part will be getting back to our pickup point," John’s dad said while setting up a series of small but powerful explosives. "We need to get out without anyone noticing, but we have to assume they'll realise we've rescued their prisoner rather quickly. Unless we do something to distract them."

Dave was given the task of positioning the explosives around the base, under the guise of putting up decorations . John’s dad held the fuse and would detonate the explosives as they were making their escape.

Time seemed to drag unbearably , and yet as the crucial hour approached, there was so much still to be done that Dave worried they wouldn't be ready in time. 

Roxy and Karkat learned which slave was usually responsible for delivering the prisoner's meal, and jumped him as he was on his way to the ablution block. 

"It's okay," Roxy said as they stuffed a gag in the poor troll's mouth and bound his hands. "We won't hurt you. And we'll leave you tied up until someone finds you. They'll know it wasn't your fault."

Poor naive Roxy. Dave could have told her it probably wouldn't matter, but he didn't want to deal with her sad guilty face .

Dave watched with an overpowering feeling of dread as Karkat and Roxy set out. John’s dad tracked them with the robot, just like they'd discussed.

"If something goes wrong, we need to know straight away," he said with a solemn expression. Dave didn't want to think about anything going wrong. He didn't want to think about anything at all.

Roxy, whatever her faults, was very good at convincing people to do what she wanted and making them think it was their own idea. She appeared in the kitchen just when the workers were noticing that the troll who usually carried the meal up was nowhere to be found, and in just a few minutes she'd convinced them to send her instead. 

Karkat kept a short distance behind her, not wanting it to look as though they were together. Once Roxy arrived outside the prisoner's room, she had assumed a persona which was just happily tipsy enough to be noticeable, and her hip flask was sticking just far enough out of her pocket that someone might notice it but think she'd been trying to hide it.

It worked. One of the guards grabbed her and snatched the flask away. He shoved her back towards the stairs, and Dave clenched his fists at seeing someone treat Roxy so roughly and not being able to do anything about it. But they didn’t actually hurt her, probably because they were planning a little bit of rule-breaking themselves by drinking when they were supposed to be on duty.

There was a tense moment where it looked like the guard who took the flask might refuse to share with the other one, but it looked as though the second guard threatened to turn him in, and suddenly the first guard became a lot more generous. The sleeping tonic took effect after only five minutes, to Dave's relief.

"They're both down. Go now, quickly," John’s dad told Roxy and Karkat through the communicator. They dashed around the corner and swiped the pass from one of the guards which allowed them to open the door.

For a prison cell, the room behind the door was downright luxurious. Hell, for a luxury penthouse apartment it would be pretty damn luxurious. Dave knew this guy was a violet-blood, but still...

The prisoner looked surprised to see them, but he recovered quickly, affecting a nonchalant demeanour that Dave immediately found obnoxious. Roxy’s robot-mounted camera didn’t receive sound, but if Roxy's expression was anything to go by, Dave imagined the guy saying something like, 'Finally! I thought you'd never get here, what kept you?' Asshole. A bit of gratitude wouldn't be too much to ask.

They presented the guy with a change of clothing which would help him blend in and hide the features which made him stand out, like his seadweller fins and his stupid hair which had a stupid purple streak dyed into it. He looked over the offered articles with his lip curled and Dave wanted to slap him. Would he rather stay locked up than have to dress in an outfit he didn’t like ?

He got dressed eventually, and Roxy and John locked the guards in his cell, leaving the flask with them. If they were lucky, the empire soldiers who found them would assume they got drunk and the prisoner took the opportunity to escape. It might buy them some time.

Dave was grew more and more tense as Karkat, Roxy, and their rescued prisoner made their way back downstairs. They played the part of two slaves helping a drunken troll go somewhere, and no one seemed to question it. By the time they reached their hiding place, Dave was waiting by the door ready to fling it open when John’s dad gave him the nod.

"You're all human!" their rescuee said upon seeing them. "Does the resistance not have any trolls in its ranks? Except for the mutant, of course," he added, looking at Karkat. "How did you avoid being culled?"

They all bristled a little bit at his tone. "If you have a problem with the manner of your rescue, we'll be happy to escort you back to your cell," said John's dad .

"Hey, no, you don't gotta take it like that, I didn't mean it like that," the troll said. "I guess you must be something pretty special, to have avoided bein' culled," he added, addressing Karkat . 

"I guess," Karkat replied slowly, having apparently decided that no matter what it sounded like, the guy truly seemed to mean it as a compliment.

"My name's Eridan. Did, uh, did Fef tell you to come and get me ?"

"No time for chatting," said Roxy. "We need to hurry if we want to get out of here."

They didn’t go out the same way they came in. People exiting headquarters were not scrutinised nearly as heavily as people coming in, so they could leave through the front door if they wanted to. In fact, Dave and John’s dad did leave that way, taking Eridan with them. Once again, Eridan played the part of a highblood accompanied by his personal servants . Karkat and Roxy left using a service entry near the laundries.

When they were a few hundred yards away, Dave heard the explosions which signalled that John’s dad had detonated the explosives they’d placed earlier. As a group they sped up a little, not outright running because that would draw attention, but walking briskly.

A few streets away was the spot where they’d agreed to meet Jade and the others. They were already there, loitering around trying to look casual. Once they were all together, the urge to run and not look back was hard to resist. The further they got from the centre of the base, though, the more careful they needed to be not to look as though they were running away. 

They slipped into the forest surrounding the base and stopped forcing themselves to travel slowly. Bro kept an eye out in front, hoping to see any sentries before they were seen themselves, but their objective now was speed. If they were fast enough, they could reach their pickup point by sunset.

They encountered a couple of sentries and were able to keep them from raising any alarm . Back at the headquarters they must surely have noticed Eridan was missing by now. It made Dave's pace quicken every time exhaustion slowed him down.

It didn’t seem to do the same for Eridan, though. "How far is it we've got to go? Could they not set the extraction point any closer?"

"No," Bro answered. Dave loved him fiercely in that moment ; it hadn’t taken his Bro more than thirty seconds to size Eridan up. Anyone with any damn sense would have shut the fuck up at that point, but of course that didn’t describe Eridan. 

"Well, okay. I never really believed the rumours that the empire was winning the war, but I guess your side must not be doin' so well after all. That's alright, though. I'm here to help now. I've studied military tactics for a long time, you know ."

"Really? Have you ever studied what to do when you're being chased by enemies armed with long range weapons who outnumber you five to one?" Jake asked, which was uncharacteristically acerbic for him.

Roxy, cutting straight to the point, said, "What do you mean, _our_ side?"

"I mean my side. I've been undercover so long, I can't even describe how difficult it's been keeping so many secrets, not being able to open up to anyone." Eridan sidled closer to Roxy, who gave him an unimpressed look and turned away .

"So," Eridan went on, "once we get picked up, will they be taking us straight to Fef? Because I've got some important information for her."

"What is it?" Bro demanded.

Eridan squirmed. "I'd really rather wait until I see Fef."

Bro wheeled around and jabbed a finger into Eridan’s chest. "They told us that you knew something important to the resistance and that we needed to get you out as soon as possible. You'd better hope we didn't risk our asses for you for no damn reason ."

"Of course not! It's very urgent."

"So tell us!"

"But Fef..."

"Listen, you purple-haired little twerp," Bro snapped, all out of patience. "Feferi isn't going to see you. Feferi doesn't give a shit about you. You were rescued because you're useful. If you're under some delusion that we were sent to save you because she has some feather-brained affection for you, get rid of it right now and tell us what we need to know before we decide to leave your worthless ass behind."

Nothing broke the silence for a second or two, and then Eridan stormed off a short distance, the tips of his ears a vibrant shade of purple and his gills drooping. Dave hated himself for feeling sorry for the guy, but he was so goddamn pathetic .

It was a good thing Eridan hadn’t gone far, because it was only a few minutes more before the resistance airship they were waiting for appeared. Eridan rejoined the group quietly, not looking anyone in the eye and not watching the ship land either.

"The empire has developed temporal enhanced missiles," he muttered as the ship finally touched the ground.

"What?" Bro demanded in a low, dangerous voice. Dave winced.

"That means when they’re launched, they can target a specific point in time, as well as in space."

"I got that, thanks,” Bro snapped. “And you couldn't bring yourself to tell us this any sooner, because you were too caught up in wanting to play hero in front of the heiress.”

"The resistance has squadrons in battle right now," Jane pointed out, her voice tight. "Hundreds of people who’ll keep thinking their position is secure right up until they’re blown to pieces. Do you have any idea how many people might have been killed already because they didn't know what they were up against?"

"I'm sorry! I just wanted Fef to know what I'd done! That's how they got me, you know, because I was tryin' to learn what the secret weapon was that everyone kept talkin' about. I wanted Fef to know I did it for her, even if I don't really get why the resistance is so important to her."

"You're a despicable piece of shit," Bro said, but with no real heat in his voice. He lifted his pack and led the way towards the airship’s doorway.

***

"What, exactly, did you manage to find out about these weapons?" Jake demanded once they were safely in the air.

Roxy had the communicator in one hand and a pen in the other, with a notepad precariously balanced on her knee. She'd dropped her usual warm, distracted demeanour, and the look she pinned Eridan with was so focused and intent that he inched back in his seat.

"I only know what I said earlier," he said. "The missiles strike a few minutes before they're launched. They've been keeping them quiet because they wanted to make a sudden multi-point attack, but now you've got me outta there, they might not bother with that anymore."

"So they could be using them right now on resistance fighters who have no idea what they're dealing with," said Jane. Dave thought about AR and the trolls he got along with from his classes being killed by a missile they could never see coming and fought down the urge to punch Eridan in the face. It wasn’t actually his fault.

"Don't you know anything more? Anything useful?" Roxy asked.

Eridan shook his head, his fins drooping again. "I didn't get a chance to find out how they're made or how to stop them, nothing."

"But you must know something. What kind of range do they have? What's the blast radius? How does their targeting work?"

"Oh!" Eridan perked up, seeming to realise that he did know something after all. "The range isn't much. Only twenty miles. And they're less powerful than a class three diffusion rifle. And the targeting system is really complicated because they need to target a temporal as well as a geographical location."

"Well done," Roxy murmured, making notes furiously. "I knew you couldn't be as useless as you look."

"You're welcome," Eridan said, trying to sound miffed, but Dave could see the small grin at the corners of his mouth .

The aircraft was on course back to the resistance base, but Roxy wasn’t waiting until they arrived. She was already on her communicator going over the situation with the colonel.

"They've started using the missiles," she relayed, her face grim. "Our losses have been heavy. We need to figure out a counter-strategy."

She doodled on the notepad a little bit and then said, "It sounds like the targeting system is the weak point. I'm guessing that's what causes the limitations on the missile range - that they need to be close in order to get a precise enough lock."

"Yeah," Eridan said, nodding uncertainly. "Yeah, I think that's right. They developed them in the first place because they thought they’d be useful for assassinations or sabotage, but they have to be close for the targeting to work, and the equipment is too bulky to sneak near enough to the targets they really want to go after.”

“How do they know where to target?” Dave wondered aloud. Roxy raised an expectant eyebrow at Eridan.

“How am I supposed to know that?” Eridan whined. “I assume they choose their targets by seeing the impact.”

“But...” Dave said, slowly because he was still figuring out what he was going to say, “that doesn’t make sense. It’s a loop, but it has no start or end. They know where to aim because they see the explosion, because they already shot a missile there, because they saw the explosion. Where did that knowledge come from? It can’t just appear from nowhere.” Dave paused and realised everyone was staring at him. “They’re cheating,” he finished weakly .

“It’s a paradox,” Roxy agreed, taking notes furiously. “Yes, we can work with that. Nice work, Dave. So you’re saying that a loop like that can’t be completely self-contained, they have to be getting their information from somewhere else?”

It took Dave a second to realise Roxy was still talking to him and longer to come up with a response. “Well, based on what’s happening, I guess we can make a few assumptions about how time works. It is possible to influence the past. These look like closed loops from our perspective – it’s not like we have memories of our soldiers not getting blown up, and then history is suddenly getting changed on us – but I don’t think that’s what they actually are.” Dave sighed and rubbed his forehead, feeling tired. Everyone was looking at him, he realised, which was weird because it wasn’t as though he was some time travel expert. He only had so much energy for puzzling shit out, though, and it was all currently occupied. 

“They’d still have to get their information from somewhere. Spies? Intercepting our communications? Infrared cameras? They wouldn’t need to fuck with time to use any of those things.”

“So what do you think is going on?” Roxy asked.

“I think there’s... timelines,” Dave said. He closed his eyes for a moment as though it would help him explain himself better. “Each change to history creates another timeline, but also, they, um...” He paused, struggling to find the words to explain something that made perfect sense in his head. “If they’ve found a way to see or find out what’s happened in other timelines, they might be using that.” 

“Of course,” Roxy murmured, scribbling furiously. “That would account for everything. We might even be able to turn their own weapons against them, but we’re going to have to basically develop the same technology from scratch. You," she said, pointing at Eridan, "get over here. You need to tell me if I'm on the right track ."

Eridan shuffled over to sit next to Roxy with the expression of one approaching the gallows.

They arrived back at their base not too long afterwards. Roxy dragged Eridan off to her lab, babbling about parameters and consecutive randomisers and other stuff Dave didn’t understand, but the rest of them went their own ways. Dave wasn’t sure what the others were up to, but he wanted a bath, a hot meal and a nap, in that order . He was more than ready to stop thinking about the war for the night.

Karkat went with him, and they wearily trudged through the streets without speaking, the backs of their hands brushing together every two seconds until Dave gave in and threaded his fingers through Karkat's. 

He didn’t want to let go of Karkat's hand, even when they reached their hive. Even when they reached the ablution block. Dave didn’t want to argue about who got to wash first anyway, so he shrugged and pulled Karkat through the door after him, ignoring his affronted squawk.

For a minute Dave sort of regretted that he was too damn tired to really enjoy the situation, but the hot water felt so good it took his mind off it. For a few minutes they were both busy scrubbing days' worth of dirt and sweat from their skin, until finally Dave felt blissfully clean and let himself fall against Karkat's side. They sat in the tub trading lazy kisses and lazier caresses, until Karkat's eyes began to droop and his head began to nod, almost poking out Dave's eye with one of his horns. Dave's stomach growled embarrassingly loudly, and Karkat woke with a jump.

Sheepishly, they climbed out of the tub. Karkat moved away but Dave wasn’t ready to let him go yet, so he grabbed a towel and patted Karkat dry, admiring the well-defined chest and shoulders which Karkat usually insisted on hiding under layers and layers of clothes.

"Do you have to stare?" Karkat grumbled, the tips of his ears showing a hint of red. "I know I look weird."

"What? No, you look awesome. What are you on about?"

Karkat laughed, a ragged, desperate sound. He ran one hand over the bright red grub-scars on his side. Dave dropped the towel and put his hands to Karkat's shoulders. 

"I know I'm human and we don't get the whole hemospectrum thing, but whatever. Anything which says you're not hot as fuck is just wrong, and also stupid ." He dropped his hands to Karkat's waist and pressed up against him from knees to chest. "I'm not staring because I think you look weird," he whispered into Karkat's ear, and he could feel Karkat's shiver against his skin .


	9. Chapter 9

It took three agonising days for Roxy and Eridan to develop a program which would attack the targeting system used by the empire. Three days during which they kept hearing about more defeats and crushing losses for the resistance.

"Kanaya's out there somewhere," Karkat pointed out, his voice strained. He and Dave were supposedly playing a game of cards, but neither of them had taken a turn for at least fifteen minutes. Dave was only holding the cards so that he had something to do with his hands. He nodded silently to Karkat’s statement because there was nothing he could say in reply .

At the end of the third day, Roxy emerged from her workshop looking tired but triumphant.

"I think we've done it," she said. "I think this will work."

The problem was that, just like the targeting system used by the empire itself, Roxy's sabotage program had to be close to its target before it would work . The program would swap the missile target from whatever the operator entered to the missile’s current location. If they could get this to work, the missiles would be basically useless to the Empire. 

"We can't just transmit the program to a husk terminal on the battlefront, because it's too large," Roxy explained with a worried frown. "And there are some security concerns as well, if we were to try that. The more we catch them off guard, the better for us. We want them to be scared to try using this again.”

What this meant was that the resistance needed small teams of soldiers who could go out into the warzone carrying a husktop which had Roxy's program on with it, as well as all the extensive hardware it apparently required, and trigger it at the appropriate moment in coordination with the other teams who were doing the same thing . Stopping the missiles wasn’t possible, due to the time loop technology, so they’d turned to redirecting them instead.

Most of the soldiers who could be trusted with a mission as important as this had already been dispatched to the front lines, except for those who had been on other missions and recently returned. In fact, it was basically just the nine of them.

Jake and Roxy were to stay behind and coordinate the operation. The rest of them were split up to deliver Roxy’s program to three key points on the front lines. Bro, Jane and Jade were headed for one of the most contested spots, the three of them together because it was expected to be the most dangerous. John and his dad were sent to a spot a little way north of that, while Dave and Karkat’s target was further south. Dave was sure the only reason they were letting he and Karkat pair up like that was because their target was expected to be the least risky, but he wasn’t going to argue if it meant being able to keep an eye on Karkat himself.

It was too far to travel on foot and too conspicuous to fly. They were provided with personal motorised two-wheeled transport devices which should allow them to make the necessary journey in a few hours. 

Jake was giving them directions via the communicator, relayed through a speaker and microphone system installed in the sleek helmets they’d been provided. Every so often, Dave could hear John or Roxy say something, keeping Jake updated on their own progress. Dave and Karkat were expected to reach their destination first; it was the closest and the terrain was easier. They hadn’t seen any enemy soldiers yet, but occasionally Dave could hear the sounds of battle through the communicator.

Their destination was still an hour away when Dave turned a corner and noticed an Alternian vehicle sitting beside the road, partially hidden between two trees. He immediately pulled to a stop, with Karkat following his lead. The motorcycles weren’t terribly loud, compared to Earth motorcycles, but the noise was enough to bring half a dozen trolls spilling out of the vehicle.

“Shit,” Karkat yelped, grabbing his blaster. Dave followed suit, abandoning his motorcycle to dive for the shelter of a nearby tree. He heard the sound of blaster fire behind him, footsteps and shouting. He looked around for Karkat frantically. What if he’d been hit?

But no, Karkat was on the other side of the road, having pulled his motorcycle up next to a stone fence. Clever. It looked like he was trying to peek over the fence to take a shot at the enemy soldiers, but he was pinned down with blaster fire. Dave should probably try to do something about that.

Maybe the trolls hadn’t noticed Dave jump behind the tree, or maybe they assumed that, being human, he wasn’t a threat. Whatever, they were about to learn what a mistake that was. He shot the one troll who was approaching his position and took aim at one of the trolls pinning Karkat down. He only managed to shoot her in the shoulder, but she dropped to one knee with a shout, and the other trolls looked around, allowing Karkat to shoot another of them while they were distracted.

That left two trolls, one of them wounded. Dave stood up, ready to finish the fight, when the sound of laughter behind him chilled him from the inside out.

“Yessssssss,” said a female voice. “To think, I thought this mission was going to be booooooooring! Looks like we’re going to have allllllll the fun .”

Dave turned around. There was a third troll standing behind him, tangled black hair falling over her shoulders, and a terrifying gleam to her eyes. She wasn’t even holding a weapon, but she was looking at Dave like he was prey . He shifted his grip on his blaster and planted his feet. Her grin widened. Dave didn’t have time to puzzle over that, because she sprang towards him, almost as fast as Bro , claws up and ready to slash. Dave pulled the trigger of his blaster, but it misfired, emitting an alarming noise and enough heat that Dave dropped it with a curse. The troll clawed at his shoulder, but didn’t do as much damage as Dave had feared. He wondered if she’d pulled the blow intentionally, like she was playing with him .

The troll scraped a hand along the ground, flinging dirt and leaf litter at Dave’s face. His shades protected his eyes, but he got a mouthful of crud which made him cough. He drew his sword and took a swing, but she rolled underneath it. Again and again, Dave’s strikes missed as the troll dodged out of the way at the last minute every time, sometimes not even seeming aware of the attack coming towards her. Again and again, she attacked with her claws and feet, attacks which Dave should have had no difficulty evading but which he only narrowly avoided each time. How was she doing it? No one was that lucky.

Dave was becoming frustrated. When the troll snarled at him, he realised she was becoming frustrated too. Maybe she had expected the fight to be over by now. She took a couple of steps back, something unexpected enough to make Dave pause. The troll glared at him with her face scrunched in concentration. For a second, Dave wondered what she was trying to do, but then he just felt tired. Too tired to be curious about the strange troll. He just wanted to sleep. He wanted to sleep, but... but he couldn’t. He needed to stay awake, for some reason. He couldn’t remember it, but it was important .

More than once Bro had made him strife after being awake for more than twenty-four hours, and he’d had to get used to working on little sleep during the years he’d spent as a slave. That served him well now, as he forced his eyes to stay open and took another swing at the troll.

She was concentrating so hard she almost didn’t react in time. She dodged, but fell to the ground with a furious shout. Dave grabbed the opportunity, leaping in to stand above her,   
his sword ready.

In one move the troll kicked his feet from under him and launched herself upright. Dave fell to his knees. He tried to get back up, but the troll grabbed his arm, his left arm, which held his sword, and tossed him to the side with alarming strength. He slammed into a tree with such force that his vision went white for a moment. He fell to the ground, trying to catch himself, but his arms were limp and useless like noodles. He’d dropped his sword somewhere. He could see the troll coming towards him, but he could barely move to defend himself. He couldn’t even breathe.

The troll crouched down next to him. Dave finally managed a shallow breath, but then the troll put her hands around his neck and squeezed. She was so strong. The way this was going, she’d crush his throat before he suffocated. Dave kicked his feet helplessly. He tried to prise her hands off his throat, but his head was swimming and he wasn’t as strong as she was. He couldn’t call for help. Bro and Roxy weren’t there to help him. Maybe they were being killed too, because Dave had fucked up by letting this troll sneak up on him. Karkat and everyone else were too far away. Dave was going to die here before anyone could come to help him, and then the soldiers would go after his friends and kill them as well.

No, he couldn’t let that happen. He let his hands fall away from the troll’s grip on his neck, searching along the ground for something that would help. His fingertips brushed up against a stone, and he wrapped his hand around it. The troll’s lips were moving, and Dave realised she must be speaking, but all he could hear was a pounding, rushing noise in his head. Weird. Was he hearing his own heartbeat ?

This close, Dave could see that one of the troll’s eyes was odd. Instead of one pupil, like the other eye, this one had what looked like several smaller pupils. He stared at it, fascinated and creeped out, and then he swung with the rock as hard as he could.

He struck the troll in the face, right next to that strange eye of hers, and she fell backwards with a shout. He took a deep breath of precious, precious oxygen, and scrambled to pick up his sword. The troll began to stand, one hand covering her face, and Dave swung wildly with the sword, not caring much where it hit, so long as it did.

He struck the troll on the arm, just below the shoulder. It must have been a deep cut, because bright blue blood splattered from the wound, and the sleeve of her jacket was soaked within seconds. The troll cried out and put one hand over the wound. Her other hand still covered her eye, and there was blood seeping through her fingers there too. 

Dave stared until his attention was drawn by Karkat bellowing his name. Dave looked towards him and saw that Karkat had apparently killed the two other trolls while Dave was fighting. He was already sitting on his motorcycle and looking at Dave impatiently. Dave grabbed his own motorcycle and hauled it upright, grunting with pain at the effort. As he powered up the motorcycle the troll began to laugh, a loud cackle like it was the best joke she’d ever heard . 

Once they were away from the site of the battle, Dave realised he could hear Jane and Jake over the communicator, anxious demands to know what was happening and if they were alright.

“I’m fine,” Karkat said, and Dave let out a relieved sigh, “but one of those trolls just slammed Dave right into a tree.”

“Dave, are you hurt?” Jake asked.

“What? I’m fine,” said Dave. Sure, he hurt like fuck all over, but he could still finish the job.

John’s voice came next. “Are you sure, Dave? We could hear bits of the fight, it sounded rough .”

Dave groaned. Apparently the whole gang had heard him getting his ass kicked, and were now going to chime in with their worries.

“Seriously, John, it’s nothing.”

“But...”

“If Dave says he’s fine, then he’s fine.”

Dave silently vowed undying gratitude to his brother . “Yeah, see? I’m fine.”

They continued on, and not much time passed before Jake said, “Karkat, Dave, you’re getting a little far from our position now for me to keep guiding you, so someone from your target location is going to help you the rest of the way.”

The communicator buzzed with static for a second, and then an unfamiliar voice spoke, female and rather young-sounding.

“You need to turn north about ten degrees,” she said. “And try to pick up the pace a bit too.”

Dave realised that the background noise he’d assumed was distortion and static was actually gunfire and explosions, and forced himself to go faster, even though it hurt to travel so fast over the rough ground. Their guide continued to provide directions, her cheery voice a strange counterpoint to the escalating battle noises in the background. In between instructions, they learned that her name was Aradia and that she was part of a unit which had been holding off Alternian advances for five days .

“You should see some hills up ahead,” Aradia said. “Head towards the one with the tower on top.”

Dave could see it; the tower Aradia was referring to was a bit like a radio tower, but taller and branching out at the top on odd angles. He saw a flash of light in that direction, followed by an explosion heard through the communicator, and forced himself faster again.

“Don’t take the path on the left, it’s not safe,” Aradia told them. Even she was beginning to sound kind of strained. “Take the path on the right. Just be careful not to miss it.”

Dave understood the warning when they finally reached the branch in the paths; the right path was so narrow as to be almost invisible. More often than he would have liked, he and Karkat had to get off their motorcycles and walk them around obstacles. The motorcycle was heavy, and hauling it around made Dave feel like his chest was full of shards of glass. He coughed, and suddenly it was hard to stop coughing. Just when he thought he was done, another wave of coughs came over him.

“Are you okay?” Karkat asked. He sounded worried, but Dave didn’t have the energy to lift his head up and look at Karkat’s face. He nodded.

“I’m fine,” he rasped, grimly pushing the motorcycle onwards. 

He would probably have faced a barrage of worried questions from Jake and the others over the communicator, but they were clearly busy with their own problems. And that was just as well, really – not that they were in danger, of course, but just that they didn’t have the opportunity to fuss over Dave since he was fine. He just needed to get this finished and then rest for a while.

There was nothing to keep Karkat from fretting, though. “Are we close enough yet?” he asked Aradia. “We just have to be within two kilometres of their missile system, we’ve got to be near enough, right?”

“Almost,” said Aradia. “Just make it over the next ridge.”

“It’s just I’m not sure Dave can make it that far-”

“Fuck you,” Dave snapped, suddenly furious. “I told you, I’m fine. I-” He had to pause to cough some more, and then finished, “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

He pushed forward like he thought he could outrun Karkat, which was a pretty stupid idea, but Karkat stopped bugging him anyway, just followed with an air of oppressive concern .

Dave reached the top of the ridge, only to see yet another rise ahead of him. He sighed and put his head down, but Karkat called out to him.

“Dave, we’ll stop here! We’re at the top, Aradia. We need to stop.”

Dave opened his mouth to argue, but instead he coughed, a harsh hacking cough that bent him double and made him feel like his chest was on fire.

“That’s fine, you’re close enough.”

“We’re running late, anyway,” Karkat muttered as he approached Dave. “No point trying to reach our original target.”

Dave didn’t reply, telling himself it was because he was pissed, not because the idea of talking was unbearable. They unpacked the husktop, and Dave took charge of setting it up while Karkat told Jake they were almost ready.

Before he was done, Dave felt the need to cough again. He tried to suppress it, remembering how much it had hurt last time, but it was no good. The force of the cough made him double over, and the pain was suddenly worse, much worse than before . He tried to breathe and it felt like someone was squeezing his lungs in a giant fist. He coughed again and saliva dripped from his mouth, and when he wiped it away it was tinged with red.

There were hands on him. Dave wanted to look up and see who it was, but he couldn’t move and he couldn’t really see much either, darkness closing in around his peripheral vision while the small area that he could see grew smaller and smaller. Dave thought he should probably tell Karkat that something was wrong, and then the darkness was everywhere and he was falling down into it, and everything he’d wanted to say was forgotten .

***

He was tired. Karkat was there, at least sometimes. Other times, Jane or Roxy or John were there instead. Once, Dave thought he saw Bro. He was never alone. Sometimes, people talked to him, or maybe about him, their voices hushed and worried. Sometimes they seemed to move around the room faster than Bro could flashstep, here one instant and gone the next. Other times, Jade or Jake sat next to Dave for what felt like hours or even days without moving.

And then Dave woke up, with enough wits about him to wonder what had happened and where he was.

He was lying on a convalescing surface. Next to him was a chair and Jane was sitting in it. Clearly, he was in the medical centre, and with that to prompt him he remembered collapsing on top of a hill while trying to set off Roxy’s program. He tried to sit up, but, while it didn’t hurt like it had before, there was a sensation of pressure in his chest which suggested that staying put was a much better idea.

“Oh, Dave, be careful. I’ll help you if you need to sit up.” 

Jane stuck some pillows behind him and Dave leaned back into them with a grimace. He opened his mouth to ask what had happened but Jane stuck a glass of water with a straw in his face and Dave realised he was incredibly thirsty.

Once he’d drained the glass, Dave asked, “Where’s Karkat? Is everyone okay? Did we set off Roxy’s program? Did it work? What happened?”

“Slow down, Dave,” said Jane, smiling. “Everyone’s fine. I’m not sure where Karkat is, but he won’t be far away. We’ve all been very worried about you, mister .”

“What happened?”

Jane’s expression turned serious. “You broke three ribs, and one of them punctured your lung. All that riding around on the motorcycle didn’t do you any favours. You really should have told us you were hurt. It’s very lucky that you were near the resistance encampment when you collapsed; they were able to reach you and look after you until we could get you out of there.”

“I meant, what happened with the missiles?” Dave clarified.

“Oh, it worked perfectly. Karkat triggered the program when you collapsed. You gave him an awful fright, you know. I think he’s going to have words for you when he gets back.”

Of course he would. Dave grimaced, remembering snapping at Karkat and insisting he wasn’t hurt, right up until he collapsed. Karkat must be furious with him. He couldn’t believe he’d been so useless .

Jane saw his expression and patted his hand. “Don’t look so gloomy. He’s upset because he cares. We all do. We just want you to take care of yourself.” Jane looked over to the doorway, and stood up. “Well, I think I’d rather like a cup of coffee and something to eat. If you’ll excuse me, Dave, I’ll come back and see you a little later. Make sure you get some rest, won’t you?”

Jane left the room and Dave saw her pass Karkat in the doorway on her way out. Dave blinked at him, feeling a twist of anxiety in his stomach.

“Uh, hey,” Karkat said, stepping just inside the room. “Are you... okay ?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Dave said. Karkat’s eyes flashed with the anger Dave had been expecting to see since he’d appeared. 

“Oh, yeah? Are you really fine, or is it just more bullshit?”

Dave looked down at his hands, folded over the top of the blanket covering him . “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to... um... I really didn’t think I was hurt that bad.”

Karkat breathed out heavily through his nose. “You were coughing up blood because you had a piece of chest scaffold slowly shredding one of your breath sacs. You passed out and I thought maybe you were dead. And you’re saying that at no point did you consider that maybe there was a problem you should tell me about?”

“Uh...” Dave said. When Karkat put it like that, he really couldn’t say much. “No, but....” He fell quiet when he failed to think of anything to say which might make Karkat less furious with him. “I’m sorry ?”

“Fuck your apology! You scared the shit out of me, and the whole time I knew something was wrong and you wouldn’t accept my help! Do you know you nearly died? What do you think I would have done then, huh? Knowing I was right there the whole time and you wouldn’t let me help? Do you really think that little of me?”

“What? No!” Dave tried to lean forward so he could reach for Karkat, but his chest protested the movement and he leaned back again with a grunt.

“Don’t fucking move, you complete imbecile! I guess none of what I’ve said has got through your impenetrable skull, because you’re still trying to fuck yourself over. Well, I’m done just standing back and letting you get away with shit, so do what you’re fucking told. Lie down. Don’t fucking move. And shut the fuck up.”

Dave did as he was told, eyes wide. “Wow .”

Karkat sniffled and dropped into the chair Jane had been sitting in earlier. “You can’t do that again,” he said.

“I won’t,” Dave replied automatically, even though he wasn’t sure he could keep the promise. He needed to do better at not getting hurt, but they were still at war. He should have been tougher. Who collapsed from a stupid broken rib?

Since Karkat seemed to be done with telling him off, at least for now, Dave asked about the mission. Apparently it had been just as much a success as Jane had led him to believe, and Dave had been the only one careless enough to get himself seriously injured. 

Karkat wandered off eventually, to take a shower and get a change of clothes. Dave drowsed, still feeling tired and the medication making him sleepy. Visitors dropped in and out. Roxy came by with a bouquet of flowers bigger than she was and hugged Dave as much as she could while he was lying down. Jake visited to shake his hand and tell him, “Jolly good work, young man, but next time you get hurt don’t try to keep it a secret, will you?” John visited, seeming delighted to see Dave was awake. “Everyone said you’d be fine, but I couldn’t really believe them until I saw you wake up.”

Jade sat with him for a while and called him a fuckass, from which Dave gathered she’d been hanging out with Karkat. John’s dad kept him company while he ate dinner, and then before he left, looked intently at Dave’s face and said, “Be more careful next time, son, there’s no shame in looking after yourself.”

It was much later that night, when most people were asleep, and the only reason Dave was awake was that he’d already slept so much of the day away, that Bro came to see him . Dave had been kind of hoping he wouldn’t. He hated the idea of Bro seeing him like this, so helpless and weak.

“Hey,” Bro said, sitting down on the edge of the chair like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to sit or stand .

“Hey,” Dave mumbled.

There was silence for a few unbearable moments.

“You gave everyone a real scare,” Bro said at last.

“Sorry,” Dave muttered, feeling his face burn with humiliation.

“You said you weren’t hurt,” Bro added.

“I’m sorry,” Dave repeated, a little more forcefully. “I messed up, in that fight. I shouldn’t have let her get the best of me like that.”

Bro sighed. “That’s not what I meant. I’m the one who fucked up. I wanted you to be able to take care of yourself, but I didn’t want you thinking it was more important to be tough than to keep yourself alive.”

“I didn’t die,” said Dave, rolling his eyes .

“No, but it was close,” said Bro. “And I didn’t understand why you’d insisted you weren’t hurt, but then your friend Karkat had a word with me.” Bro paused and grimaced. “Several words, actually. He’s loud.”

Dave groaned and put his hands over his face. “I’m gonna kill him,” he said. “Whatever he told you was a complete lie.”

“He said you were hurt when you guys escaped from an Alternian spacecraft, and you had no problem letting him patch you up. He thinks the difference is me... that you didn’t want to look weak in front of me.”

Dave froze, not even letting himself breathe.

“Is that true?” Bro asked.

“No,” Dave choked out.

“I always knew I wasn’t really doing a good job raising you. I figured it was okay, because the other guys would pick up my slack, but I fucked up even more than I realised.”

“That’s not true!”

“I don’t know. That’s not what everyone else has been saying. But you’re not a kid anymore, you don’t have to be a dumbass just because I’m a dumbass.”

“Bro, you’re not...”

“No, I’m serious. Don’t do that again.”

Dave sighed and slumped onto his pillows, exhausted. “Fine .”


	10. Chapter 10

Dave spent a lot of time over the next few days confined to his bed, talking to Rose on Trollian. She’d been talking to Roxy as well and bothered Dave in between their conversations to freak out about the fact that she was staring down a family reunion like a small, squishy bunny staring into the headlights of a speeding SUV .

Dave tried to lend a sympathetic ear, remembering how badly he’d dealt with encountering John and everyone else, but it wasn’t so easy. After everything that had happened, it was difficult to remember why the fear and anxiety had gripped him so hard . It was for Rose, though, so he did his best.

One of the perks of being a massive hero was time off, apparently. Once Dave was well enough to be up and about, they were all awarded spaces on a ship back to Mennara, and Dave spent a good three quarters of the trip giving Rose a pep talk. 

TT: It’s not that I’m averse to the idea of seeing her, you understand. I’m experiencing a good amount of anticipation, but also some trepidation as to how it will play out.

TG: its gonna be fine rose

TT: Well, of course it probably will be.

TT: But then again, what if we’re wrong?

TG: what could possibly go wrong about you seeing your hot mom again?

TT: You sound flippant, Dave, but there are so many potential pitfalls. What if she’s shocked at how much I’ve changed? What if she becomes upset? What if she asks me questions about the past three years?

TG: wow no comment on the hot mom thing huh. this has really got you worked up

TT: It’s not the same when I can tell you’re doing it deliberately to distract me . Dave, when I try to imagine this reunion, all I can think is that I’m even more ill-equipped to deal with her specific brand of affection than I was before. Does that make sense?

TG: not really no

TT: What if she tries to hug me, Dave?

TG:

TG: do you want me to talk to her

TT: NO

TG: ... fine

TT: I think I will go finalise my preparations for this reunion. There is not long now.

TG: what preparations what do you even need to prepare

TG: rose?

TG: rose?

TG: dammit

turntechGodhead stopped pestering tentacleTherapist

***

With that worrying exchange over, Dave busied himself for the rest of the journey by bothering Karkat. Maybe Karkat had realised that some of Rose’s anxiety had transferred to Dave, because he was unusually patient with Dave’s tomfoolery and only threatened him with bodily harm three times .

They landed on Mennara, and from there it wasn’t that long until they arrived back at the apartment Dave and Karkat had left to Rose and Sollux. Not all of them, of course, the apartment was far too small for that, but Roxy, Jade and John were desperate to see Rose. 

Based on his conversation with her over Trollian, Dave was not at all expecting to see Rose answer the door, but that was exactly what she did. She greeted them with a cool smile and waved them inside, not quite meeting anyone’s eyes. 

Sollux was there, of course, and so were Gamzee and Tavros. Karkat hugged Sollux and then immediately tried to pretend that he was much too cool to have done such a thing. He complained about Gamzee making a mess of the dining table, which was covered in a variety of magazines and loose magazine pages from some project Gamzee was in the middle of. But he didn’t actually move anything or mess with whatever organisational system Gamzee might have had.

Dave hi-fived Tavros and introduced him to John, Jade and Roxy, then pulled Sollux aside to quietly ask after Rose.

“How’s she coping?”

“Fine,” said Sollux. “Fine, I think.”

Dave watched as Rose offered everyone something to drink and made sure they had somewhere to sit, as though they were strangers who’d come to visit for the first time. 

“She hasn’t been talking much,” Sollux admitted, when he picked up on Dave’s insistent worry. “I suppose this is just how she copes.”

Dave didn’t like it, but he conceded that Sollux was probably right. Rose kept herself busy, getting out food to offer to everyone and always realising there was something that urgently needed doing whenever Roxy or John seemed to be paying too much attention to her. Seeing John’s hurt, confused expression, Dave took him aside.

“She’s acting like she doesn’t know us, Dave. Do you think she wants us here? Maybe we should go.”

Dave wasn’t entirely sure of the answer, but he tried to reassure John anyway. “No, it’s fine. It’s like when you found me. It’s... hard, but I really did want to see you all again. I was just sc—uh, worried that you guys would think I wasn’t cool after all, after everything. And it’s the same for Rose. The first time I saw her, you know, she ran off and hid?”

“Really?” John asked, frowning.

“Yeah. I mean. It’s got to be a bit overwhelming, right? But she just needs time. She’s managing as best she can, so you just have to be patient.”

“Okay,” John said, looking a fraction less troubled.

Roxy and the others had all been given quite luxurious quarters near the transport station, in light of the resounding success of their mission. Dave and Karkat had been given rooms there as well, but they both agreed that they wanted to stay with Sollux and Rose instead. It had been a long time, and Dave had been worried about both of them. 

Roxy, John and Jade stayed for an hour or so, drinking tea and chatting about nothing of importance. They gathered their things and began to say their goodbyes, Rose maintaining her detached demeanour the whole time, until Roxy was about to step through the door. Rose’s composure cracked and she grabbed her mother’s shoulders, hugging her almost desperately. Dave boggled for a minute, and then he and Karkat herded everyone else to the other end of the room to give them at least a semblance of privacy.

Much later, as Dave was getting ready for bed, Rose confided in him, “I almost messed up again, Dave, like I did with Kanaya before she was deployed , but I’m trying to tell people they’re important to me before it’s too late.”

“That’s good,” Dave said, feeling a little lost for anything better to say in response. It sounded alarmingly well-adjusted.

Rose nodded, her gaze a little unfocused, before she grabbed Dave and hugged him, less urgently than she had Roxy, but just as tightly.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she said .

***

Dave had always thought about returning to Earth one day, but now that he knew everyone he cared about was safe and well, it didn’t seem so urgent anymore.

There was still a war to be fought. They all took some time to recuperate, but soon, much sooner than Dave would have chosen, he walked out of his bedroom and into an intense discussion between John, Karkat and Roxy, about who was getting deployed (everyone) to where (too far away, and they weren’t even being kept together) and when (too soon. Much too soon).

He was pissed off until he realised that he could be as angry as he wanted, but it wouldn’t change anything. Wouldn’t end the war or his role in it, wouldn’t even force anyone to make different choices on his account. The stakes were too high for that. So he decided that he wasn’t pissed off after all, he was fine, and he said as much to anyone who asked, doubling down when they insisted that it was alright to be angry, or worse, scared.

There were missions. One of them, one of the early ones, he and Karkat had been separated. By the time it was over, Dave was a complete wreck, convinced that he was never going to see Karkat again. He quietly decided not to let the two of them be split up again, and quickly convinced Karkat to volunteer for another mission soon after, trying to cover up how badly rattled he was.

They served under Kanaya on one mission, and Dave gained a whole new degree of terrified respect for her. When things went badly, she held their squad together until she was badly wounded. She was lucky to survive. They all were. Kanaya decided not to push her luck again, and stopped accepting combat missions. She worked in administration for a little while, and then she and Rose left Mennara, planning to travel to Earth which was, if not completely liberated, getting close to it.

Later on, and against Dave’s better judgement, Sollux joined he and Karkat on a mission. Dave might try to forget standing next to Sollux on the bridge of the spacecraft, watching him explode empire vessels with his psionics, but he doubted he’d ever manage it. Later, when they were on their way back to Mennara for debriefing, Dave asked Sollux whether it bothered him to blow up ships which were being piloted by helmsmen just like him.

“Nah,” said Sollux cockily. “There are no other helmsmen like me.”

Bravado was more of a formality between them rather than something either of them were fooled by, though, so Sollux soon sobered up and added, “If I was in their shoes, I’d have been grateful to whoever blew our ship apart.”

Dave never broached that topic again.

In the end, it was Karkat who put his foot down and insisted that they step back from the fighting. Dave hadn’t even realised the toll the war was taking on him until Karkat confronted him. He was reluctant to leave the fighting at first. It felt like running away, but Karkat pointed out that the situation had changed a lot in the two years since they’d met. The resistance was no longer struggling just to hold their own. The Empire was losing ground every day, and as they grew closer to defeat, deserters weakened them even further. 

It helped that they weren’t the only ones to leave. Jake and Jane had returned to Earth long ago, John and Jade not far behind them. Not to mention Kanaya and Rose. Dave finally gave in when Sollux talked about finding somewhere to live nearby. Dave realised that Sollux and Karkat had probably talked about this before raising the subject with him, had discussed the best way to get him to agree. He wanted to feel angry about that, but agreeing to go home felt like setting down an unbearable weight, and he couldn’t feel anything except relief.

So they bid farewell to Gamzee and Tavros, who were both still living in the same apartment block they had been when they’d met. WV had been reassigned months earlier to a different galaxy, but Dave sent him a message through Trollian and he responded with delight. Nepeta and Equius had been on a combat mission for weeks and Nepeta sometimes didn’t respond to messages for several days, but Dave contacted her anyway. Rose seemed excited to have them come to Earth, and John and Jade were almost beside themselves. Everything was going great.

And then, not long before they were due to leave, Karkat said, “Have you told your brother what we’re doing yet?”

Dave shrugged, not meeting Karkat’s eyes. “I will.”

A few hours later, Dave’s palmhusk chimed with a Trollian message. He opened it and read:

timaeusTestified: Karkat says you’re heading home to Earth. I’m really happy for you two. They could really use some help there rebuilding things.

Dave didn’t speak to Karkat for four days after that. He knew he was being ridiculous, but so what? He should have been able to be ridiculous in his own time, without Karkat and Bro and every damn other person being stupidly supportive and making his neurotic impulses completely meaningless.

After the fourth day, though, Dave realised that Karkat was freaking out and that he was being an asshole, so he sucked it up and put on his best stoic face for the journey back to Earth.

***

Of all the things Dave had forgotten about Earth, the way it smelled was one he’d never really thought about. He hadn’t even really considered that Earth had its own unique smell which set it apart from every other planet he’d been to.

He was probably being a bit fanciful, because he knew Jake’s island didn’t smell like this, and even this same spot would have a different scent if the weather were cooler, or wetter, but right now he stood on the sidewalk next to a busy street, and he could smell the hot dry scent of concrete being baked by the sun, gasoline from the cars driving past and a hint of coffee from a shop he could see a few doors down. 

“Is something wrong?” Karkat asked him. Dave had almost forgotten he was there.

“This is my home,” said Dave, knowing that it was a rather nonsensical thing to say. He’d never been to this city before. He didn’t know where anything was. They’d arrived on Earth six days ago and he hadn’t reacted like this until now .

Karkat didn’t make fun of him, though. He looked around, appearing to take Dave’s words seriously, examining the traffic lights to their right and the tattoo parlour with its flashing neon sign across the street. Here and there were the signs that things hadn’t always been this peaceful; a good third of the windows were boarded over, and the road was more potholes than asphalt. The Condesce had given up on conquering Earth almost a year ago now, though, and things were clearly beginning to return to normal.

“It looks nice,” said Karkat. “Come on, the place we’re looking for is around the corner.”

Bro had been right when he said Earth needed help rebuilding things. Dave and Karkat had both been offered work almost immediately, repairing the city’s roads and fixing safety hazards like damaged telephone poles. It wasn’t exactly glamorous, but their request to be discharged from the resistance army had been granted on the condition they spent at least twelve months contributing to the reconstruction efforts, so here they were.

There were more trolls around the place than Dave would have expected. Not a lot, or anything, but enough that no one really gave them a second glance. Karkat didn’t stand out, and although he hadn’t said as much, Dave knew that was something he’d been anxious about.

Between the two of them, Dave and Karkat had more than enough money for a down payment on an apartment. The one they were looking at today was nothing special . Dave didn’t want it to be. He wanted to feel right again, to feel like he belonged somewhere, and he looked around the apartment, noting the tiny spare bedroom and single bathroom , the narrow balcony and the slightly dated appliances, and he barely even tried to wrangle the price down before agreeing to buy it.

“We’re going to need to do something about this closet,” Karkat said, casting a critical eye over the small closet with limited shelving which occupied one corner of the bedroom. “And the ablution block needs a complete overhaul. Maybe you’re okay with it, but I want a cleansing basin. A big one.”

“It’s fine, Karkat, we’ll get you the best bathtub money can buy. Hell, why not a Jacuzzi.” Dave didn’t actually care that much about what the place was like, so long as it had enough space to be comfortable and wasn’t actually in danger of falling down. And so long as Karkat was willing to share it with him. Dave wondered how Karkat would react if he shared that last thought with him, then decided to just tell him so he didn’t have to wonder .

Karkat rolled his eyes, his cheeks betraying a slight flush. “You’re an idiot,” he muttered, but he reached up to kiss the corner of Dave’s mouth.

Later, when Dave and Karkat had left the apartment and were sitting at the coffee shop Dave had noticed earlier, Dave said, “Do you think we should have looked for somewhere closer to Rose and Kanaya?”

“They’re only a three hour drive away. It’s not that far.”

Dave supposed that was true. He remembered a time when three hours felt like an eternity, but compared to vast empty space, it was really nothing. “Sollux is determined to come and stay with us, that’s all. I guess I just worry about him travelling by himself.”

Karkat gave him a shrewd look. “You’d better not let him hear you talking about him like that.”

Dave flicked an empty sugar packet in Karkat’s direction. “Shut up. Don’t pretend it’s not on your mind as well. It’s not that I don’t think he can handle himself, but there are still people around who are holding a grudge against all trolls since the invasion.”

“I know that. So does Sollux. He’s made up his mind anyway.”

Dave recognised the mild rebuke in Karkat’s tone, the reminder that they’d all experienced what it was like to have choices taken from them, but none so much as Sollux. “He’d be safer if he stayed in one place,” he muttered anyway, unable to stop himself.

“Maybe, but it wouldn’t be like Sollux to do that. I can’t believe we’re talking about a guy who’s living in two homes with two moirails, and I’m just nodding my head and thinking, ‘Yes, that makes sense,’ but here we are.”

That made Dave laugh. “You’re going to make us paint his room something hideous, aren’t you?”

“He’s going to fill the recreation block with bees. Again.”

Dave laughed even harder, although he knew Karkat wasn’t entirely kidding, and then Karkat jumped as he received a notification on his palmhusk.

“It’s Terezi,” he said, looking at the screen. “She’s asking if we’ve heard the news yet. What fucking news?” he demanded of his palmhusk, which was less than responsive.

Dave pulled out his own phone and opened a news website. “The Condesce has been killed,” he read. “The resistance attacked the last Empire stronghold this morning and broke through. They wanted to take her alive to put her on trial, but she was shot .”

Karkat’s eyes grew huge and he tapped rapidly on his own palmhusk.

“It’s over,” he whispered.

“Not... I mean, yeah. Basically, it is.”

Around the coffee shop, chatter was spreading as other people learned of the empire’s fall. The few trolls who were present cheered and clapped, while the humans shared smiles. As far as Earth was concerned, the war had been over months ago, as soon as the Condesce withdrew her troops. For Dave and Karkat, the memories were a lot more recent . 

Karkat put his phone down and rested his head on the table. Dave took his hand and waited for Karkat to say what was bothering him.

“I thought this moment would feel different. Better,” Karkat said. “Why don’t I feel happy?”

Dave took a moment to think it over, tracing the lines on Karkat’s palm . “I don’t think it’s something to feel happy about,” he said. “It’s good that it’s over, but... it’s the things we do that we should be happy about, not someone dying billions of light years away. We have somewhere to live and we can get jobs that don’t involve being shot at. Our friends are safe. You’ve got an entire species’ worth of new romantic comedies to watch, and I can start making music again. We’re going to be okay. We made it.”

Karkat sighed and lifted himself upright. It looked like it was an effort, but he smiled. “Yeah, I guess we did.”

Dave leaned back to finish his coffee with no particular sense of urgency. There was no rush. They had all the time they could want .


End file.
